Have the Spurs lost the last bit of magic for the new season with the loss of Murray?

Dejounte Murray has been injured, tearing the ACL in his right knee, and according to Popovich, Murray is likely to be out for the season.

Torn ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is not an easy word to type, but in reality, it's enough of a nightmare to put an athlete out for the season. The knee is the largest and most complex joint in the body, and the ACL, one of the core structures of the knee, is subject to at least 11 to 12 weeks of post-operative rehab after surgery, followed by core strength recovery training. Even for the experienced Spurs team doctors, it will take about six months to get Murray back on the 5v5 full-court game.

This is still based on the fact that everything is going well, if there is any recurrence like Leonard and Danny Green, the problem may be more troublesome.

Let's switch to a more innocent example: Jabari Parker, once known as the Twin with first-rounder Andrew Wiggins, suffered two consecutive ACL tears in his left knee. The Bucks, after all, are not the 76ers, who are addicted to illness, and faced with realistic pressure on their record, they first put Parker on the bench, and then put him in Chicago.

So in the three games of the preseason, Parker first tried his luck with a 5 of 14 shooting, then in front of his old boss, with a 1 of 12 steel symphony reverse to prove how wise the Bucks management's decision was. Five days later, Parker got more and more frustrated, hitting 3 of 11 shots again.

Of course, the preseason was just a warm-up for not making the numbers, and DeMar DeRozan scored 22 points against his old friend James Harden after two straight games of 3-for-6 shooting. But three consecutive games of hitting out of whack gives reason to suspect that Parker's injury has directly affected his shooting rhythm and that such "out of whack" could become his "normal".

Not to mention the impact on explosiveness, crossover speed, and player mentality.

"For an improving player, an injury like this is devastating." Rudy Gay, who was demoted from the core to the bench in his early thirties because of a torn Achilles tendon, knows exactly what such a major injury means to a player - especially to Murray Jr. who has been training hard in the offseason to take over from Tony Parker.

In the game where DeRozan scored 22 points against his old friend, Murray was injured at the moment of the breakaway power play. The road to the basket is always a difficult and difficult one, during which there are not only countless defenders, but also the physical confrontation that comes with defense, and the potential for injuries that are buried in a minefield - Gordon Hayward's moment in the air cut confrontation that sent chills through the court, Lin clutching his knee on the curb and crying "I 'm done", and now young Dejounte Murray, who has just kicked off the upswing of his career, is down on the break.

This means that after losing Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, who were first and third in breakthroughs per game last season, the Spurs have lost another outside anchor who was second in breakthroughs per game last season. Can such a loss be made up for by DeRozan and Derrick White alone?

On the other hand, the Spurs lost more than just a starting breakout player or a guard who was among the NBA's best defensive line-ups of the year. After the departure of Leonard, Green, and Kyle Anderson, three power forward players who ranked in the top six at their positions in terms of true defensive plus/minus, Murray has become almost the last shame of the Spurs' outside defense.

Murray is not only a guard, he plays more like a forward on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball - hustling for rebounds on the offensive end, pick-and-popping on the weak side, using physical play against the ball, and using his height and long arms to force switches on the defensive end make Murray look more like a power forward - which means that at some point he'll look like a power forward. -This means that he can fill in at the 2 and 3 positions at certain times, forming an important part of the Spurs' infinite switching system.

After losing Leonard, Green, and Sledgehammer, the Spurs this season, the outside players are Mills, DeRozan, Bryn Forbes, White, Gay, Marco Belinelli, and Dante Cunningham. The best defensive forward in this is Gay at the 24th position in the same position, and the best defensive guard is ......

DeRozan, who is 20th from the bottom at the same position.

If Murray is not injured, then in the new season the Spurs are responsible for the firefighters in the snow, not just choking brothers around the icing on the cake, and now the firefighters canceled, this summer experience a stormy Spurs can only be described as "snow on top of snow".

It can be expected that the Spurs will not play much better defense in the new season, and their offense will rely more on the double-deep combination and Gay's mid-range shooting touch. It's no wonder that the major bookies have lowered the odds on the Spurs in the face of such a Spurs team.

Injuries are unpredictable and unpreventable, they come out of nowhere like a landslide and can easily turn the efforts of players and teams into nothing. The reality is so harsh that the comfort and encouragement of LeBron James and Steph Curry will not cure Murray's injury or solve the Spurs' dilemma. The only thing the Spurs players and coaching staff can do is face the reality of the situation. Mills is well aware of this: "Each of us has to step up and fill Murray's shoes, and we know that's what we have to do."

"We have a lot of talent, we have good bench depth, we have several players who are versatile, and we'll prove that," said Gay, who is coming off a torn Achilles injury.