It seems strange to think of Monday night’s road game against the Chicago Bulls as a must-win contest for the Spurs until you consider the rest of San Antonio’s schedule in January.
The Bulls (16-19) are the only team with a losing record among the seven the Spurs (18-17) face in the first month of 2025. The rest — Denver Nuggets, Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Indiana Pacers and LA Clippers — are a combined 135-107.
Two of the Spurs’ 13 January games are in the books, a split in a back-to-back set with the Nuggets — a 113-110 win at Ball Arena in Denver on Friday followed by a 122-111 overtime loss at home the next night. Of the remaining 11 games, only four will be in the friendly confines of Frost Bank Center. Before the month ends the team will have traveled 16,571 air miles, been away from San Antonio for 20 days and nights, played five games on opponents’ courts and two in France for the NBA Paris Games 2025.
For a team that has outpaced the expectations of nearly every preseason prognosticator, the Spurs hit January with a winning record that would have put them in the Western Conference Play-In Tournament had the season ended on New Year’s Day.
Chris Paul, their 39-year-old starting point guard, had challenged his younger teammates to go into every game expecting to win and the confidence that gave them was evident. The Spurs are currently eighth in the stacked Western Conference and brimming with confidence.
Maintaining such belief long enough to mount a serious challenge for what would be the proud franchise’s first postseason appearance since 2019 might well depend on surviving what remains of the most brutal month of its season. Their trip to Chicago will be followed by a bus ride for a Wednesday game against the Bucks in Milwaukee, followed by a flight to Los Angeles for two against the Lakers at Crypto.com Arena, on Jan. 11 and 13.
When they return after that four-game road trip, the Spurs will have two straight at Frost Bank Center against the Grizzlies, a team off to a great start despite the recent absence of All-Star guard Ja Morant, who suffered a Grade 1 AC joint sprain of the right shoulder and has missed their last four games. Listed as “week-to-week” by the Grizzlies, he might be back in the lineup for the games against the Spurs on Jan. 15 and 17.
A Jan. 18 departure for Miami for a game against the Heat will begin another nine days away from home for the Spurs. They will head straight to Paris following an afternoon game against the Heat. They will delay departure for a few hours so the players and staff can enjoy a nice dinner and then get some serious sleep on the roughly nine-hour flight of roughly 4,600 miles.
The hope is they will arrive in Paris minus the jet lag that typically hits tourists after long international flights. The players will have a couple more days to acclimate to Central European Time before playing the Pacers twice over three days. Their Jan. 23 matchup in Paris officially will count as a Spurs road game. It is far more likely to seem as if they are right at home, considering the big crowd expected to turn out will be roaring for 7-foot-4 Spurs center Victor Wembanyama, born and raised in Paris and the nation’s No. 1 basketball hero.
Once they are back on Texas soil after their European sojourn, the Spurs will conclude the month with home games against the Clippers (Jan. 29) and Bucks (Jan. 31).
A year ago, the Spurs had looked at their January schedule searching for even one game they might have a shot at winning. They were 5-27 and last in the Western Conference with no prospect for anything in the postseason but another high draft pick.
Now, they believe they may have something to play for in March and April.
First, though, they must deal with the brutal January grind and understand they can’t be satisfied with getting a split in tough back-to-backs, even against teams as good as the Nuggets and three-time MVP Nikola Jokić.
“Chris said something very interesting that I agreed with,” Wembanyama said after his 20 points and career-high 23 rebounds weren’t enough to get a second win against the Nuggets. “He said, ‘We’re not here to play good games. We’re here to win games.’
“So, we could get satisfied with saying, ‘Yeah, oh well, we played them to overtime and we had a good one, fellas.’ But that’s not what we want.”
Paul’s voice has been paramount to the Spurs returning to contention for the postseason, and he has another aphorism for the approach his teammates must take for the next four-game road set.
“Start with the first game,” he said. “You can’t win them all without winning the first one.”
Harrison Barnes, 32, the only other “elder” on the Spurs roster, has helped Paul spawn the sense of confidence on a Spurs roster that has maintained an over-.500 record for the bulk of the season.
“We have an expectation to go in and win every single game,” Barnes said of the approach to the daunting January schedule. “Now it’s just putting together that 48 minutes, not being surprised when it’s a close game at the end and just knowing that it comes down to a few possessions. That’s going to be our reality, especially with the teams that we’re playing, whether it’s on the road or at home, for us to just take that next step.”
For Mitch Johnson, 16-14 since taking over as “acting coach” since Gregg Popovich suffered a mild stroke on Nov. 2, the January slate will test Johnson’s sense of lineup manipulation and load management.
“I think the schedule always is a part of whatever we do, right?” Johnson said. “Practice plans, scheduling individual players, whether that’s injury history, age, how they’re feeling, whatever it may be. So, I think the schedule is always a part of the conversation.
“I don’t think you can get too ahead of yourself in this league of trying to, I guess, get ‘cute,’ for lack of a better term. Of trying to say, ‘We’re going to play this many minutes or try to do this game.’
“It’s tough, right? Games take on different personalities and unforeseen circumstances, but we are very aware of the schedule, I’ll say that. And I think we’ll always be mindful and conservative of whatever’s best for our players’ interests.”
(Photo of Victor Wembanyama: Darren Carroll / NBAE via Getty Images)
