Spurs have obvious Devin Vassell decision to make this season

It's shaping up to be a potentially pivotal season for the San Antonio Spurs. As this team continues to evolve, the front office is going to have to make a key decision on how they view Devin Vassell in short order.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say the Spurs should decide by the end of the upcoming season whether they still view Vassell as a long-term staple in this core, or if he's expendable enough to seek out trade offers.

When Devin arrived in San Antonio back in 2020, he was already one of the premier young talents on the roster. Fast forward almost five years, and there's so many guards in this locker room that I think the Spurs have probably already begun thinking that their backcourt rotation could hypothetically look a bit different a year from now.

That itself is not meant to be a knock on Vassell's talent. With that said, there are also reasons why his skillset may end up overlapping with some of the Spurs' other guards in the rotation, or at the very least highlight areas where others on the roster may provide cleaner fits or more specialized strengths. That does not diminish what Vassell brings, but it does mean that the Spurs will have to weigh whether his role remains distinct enough in a crowded backcourt.

Devin Vassell may end up being expendable

Some among the Spurs fanbase believe that Devin may not end up as the cleanest fit with this group moving forward. There's a worthwhile argument to be made here, and I think one of the biggest relevant criticisms of Vassell's game concerns his consistency. When he's locked in, Devin brings the kind of shot-making that makes him look like a legitimate number two option at times. But his streakiness and cold spells can undercut his production.

Then on the defensive side of things, it's not like Vassell has fallen off. But his output on defense has at the very least not panned out to the level that much of the fanbase had hoped to see. It's those two factors that could lead the team to do some further evaluation, and Devin might end up looking better off as a trade chip in the coming months.

As of this writing, Vassell is still under contract for four more seasons. He'll be earning just under $27 million during that span. That contract is large enough to make a deal possible for San Antonio, but not so huge that it totally scares teams away.

The reality is that Dylan Harper, Stephon Castle and De'Aaron Fox are a very talented trio of guards. There's still a world in which Devin Vassell can thrive alongside them, but they certainly make him more tradeable than he was a couple of years ago.