Spurs Bench

On 1st and 10 today, Jay Crawford had a stat about the San Antonio Spurs. In the last couple months, they've won 5 games by 15 points in which none of their players have played 30+ minutes. He asked if it was significant?

Probably not! What do you do when you are ahead by a lot? You rest your starters. Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobli and Tony Parker are the big 3 for the Spurs, and they've all suffered injuries in the recent past, so it's not surprising that they'd have their minutes monitored.

The Spurs are a good team and there are quite a few not real good NBA teams. So, it's not surprising that they win a few games by a fair margin. Their stars don't play big minutes, on average. Duncan leads them with 34.3 minutes per game, followed closely by Parker, Bruce Bowen and Ginobli at 32.7, 30.4 and 27.6. So, it really doesn't take a lot of extra rest to get those guys under 30 minutes per game.

My question is, where do people come up with this crap?