This is a highlights piece, and I swear we will get to those highlights. However, there isn’t a movie clip in my first highlight—well, not until the whole game: In a game where a) their greatest player was forced to sit out and b) four oftheir five starters combined for a pitiful 27 points on 8 from 38 shooting, the San Antonio Spurs managed to
pullaway in the closing minutes.Tre Jones, who scored 30 points in a career night, was the primary reason the Spurs played for 48 minutes. When Wemby isn’t in the starting lineup, the player who improves Wemby and the Spurs as a whole assumes the role of best player on the team. Tre isn’t an NBA starting point guard because of this. However, Tre is unquestionably the driving force behind Spurs supporters’ improved sentiment towards their team during what has been an excruciatingly difficult season of development.However, that’s not how Tre scored 30 last night. He earned himself six trips to the charity stripe, 4.5 more than his average, and he converted each time. More importantly, he took five attempts from long distance, more than twice his average, and he made four of them.
Interestingly, he didn’t just spot up, as here:Tre also pulled up from long range. And the pull-up was particularly beautiful because the whole thing was so very human. Tre, a world-class athlete earning double-digit millions to play a game, sees an opportunity to pull up from the beyond the arc opens up for him, and you can tell he’s hesitant to take it because he has doubts about himself (like you and me every once in a while have doubts ourselves in the job we’re paid to do because we’re somewhat good at it).
