The San Antonio Spurs
NBA
MVP
All-Star
the Portland Trail Blazers
Raptors
ESPN
263rd
Basketball Reference
NBA.com
Bleacher Report
Twitter
@ZachBuckleyNBA
Leonard
Dejounte Murray
Lonnie Walker IV
Gregg Popovich
Danny Green
DeMar DeRozan
Jakob Poeltl
top-20-protected
LaMarcus Aldridge
Zach Lowe
Derrick White
Buckley
No matching tags
West
the Golden State Warriors
Kawhi Leonard
San Antonio
Alamo City
Toronto
San Antonio's
7.5-point
Dallas
Mavericks
Kawhi Leonard
And even then, the Raptors never really looked like title contenders until they replaced him with Leonard.Pairing Aldridge and DeRozan could keep San Antonio playoff-relevant—it's eighth in the crowded Western Conference standings—but nothing beyond that."This is a blah long-term play," ESPN's Zach Lowe wrote after the trade. In fact, that metric paints Aldridge fifth among San Antonio's rotation players and DeRozan two spots below.The Spurs' on/off splits see it the same way. Aldridge is scorching-hot of late (24.5 points on 59.5 percent shooting over his last 10 games), and DeRozan has never been a more effective distributor (career-high 6.3 assists per game).But there's still a ceiling for this superstar-less squad, and it's not nearly as high as a club committing this kind of coin to a pair of All-Stars would like.Rebuilding is unavoidable, and it won't be a speedy process as long as these two are keeping San Antonio in the playoff mix and out of premium draft lottery range.
As said here by Zach Buckley