Spurs are careening toward a catastrophic Harrison Barnes ending they must prevent

By now, it's safe to say that San Antonio Spurs forward Harrison Barnes is beginning to decline. Gone is the honeymoon phase of his time with the Spurs, where he shot a blistering 43.3% on 4.4 3-point attempts per game during his first season with the team.

Instead, he has been outright bad for most of this season, raising alarm bells about how he will fare come playoff time. Barnes has never been a great playoff performer, and he probably won't start now in year 14.

In fact, he has only made the playoffs just once in the 10 years since leaving the Golden State Warriors.

Ironically, he previously faced the Spurs in the postseason as a rookie and derailed Golden State's upset bid. They foolishly decided to post him up against Tony Parker, stalling their Steph Curry- and Klay Thompson-led offense in the 2013 West semi-finals.

San Antonio isn't going to run offense through him, and he has struggled even putting the ball in the basket when open.

The Spurs can't afford to over-rely on Harrison Barnes

Perhaps Barnes' downfall has been greatly exaggerated. His three-plus-season consecutive games played streak might be doing more harm than good at this point. Especially with him playing around 28 minutes per game.

Older players need more time to recover. Thus, San Antonio asking him to play fairly big minutes every game at 33 might be unfair to him and hurt his play.

If you've been keeping up, I've been on the start Julian Champagnie train for a while now. He checks more boxes and would enable the Spurs to bring Barnes off the bench and cap his playing time at around 22 minutes per game.

Harrison Barnes must come off the bench for the Spurs

Hopefully, he might regain some of his form playing against second units and not having to play big minutes.

Relying less on him now could save the Spurs from realizing later that he may not be up to the task of contributing in the playoffs. San Antonio has already been trending away from Barnes with more minutes for Champagnie and Luke Kornet, and they should continue to do so.

The best-case scenario is that he plays better in limited minutes and is able to contribute to a deep playoff run. The worst case is that he can't, but the Spurs can mitigate that risk by benching him now ahead of the playoffs.