Scouting one-pager: San Antonio Spurs (SAS)

2025-26 regular season · 82 games · 7,371 FGA. Auto-generated by scouting/build_onepager.py from public data; every number traceable to a gated pipeline in this repo. Shot pricing uses the 2023-24 shot-quality model, whose season-out transfer was validated in the backtest; shot-making is empirical-Bayes shrunk before it is allowed to drive a conclusion.

Terms

• PPS: Points per shot: total points on field-goal attempts divided by attempts. Free throws excluded.
• xPPS: Expected points per shot - the model's fair price of a shot diet: what an average shooter would score on the same attempts, judged from location and shot type alone, before knowing what went in.
• shot-making: Actual minus expected points per 100 shots: conversion above or below what the shot diet itself explains. Positive means making shots the model prices as hard.
• EB making: A player's shot-making after empirical-Bayes shrinkage: the observed number pulled toward the league mean in proportion to its sampling noise. The number to trust for projection.
• FGA: Field-goal attempts.
• RAPM: Regularized adjusted plus-minus: a ridge regression crediting each player with net points per 100 possessions while adjusting for the other nine players on the floor.
• net_100: Net points per 100 possessions: 100 x plus-minus / possessions; sits on the same scale as the NBA's published net rating.
• rush: Shots in the final four seconds of a period - the desperation window where both shot selection and execution collapse.
• empirical Bayes: Estimate the spread of true skill across the league from the data, then pull each individual's noisy estimate toward the league mean in proportion to its noise.
• shrinkage weight: The fraction of an observed number that survives empirical-Bayes regression: 1 means fully trusted, 0 means replaced by the league mean.
• CI: Confidence interval.
• corner three: A three-pointer from the corner, where the NBA line is roughly 3 ft closer than the arc - the geometry discount that makes it the cheapest three.

Keys

• They hunt corner threes: 32.7% of their threes come from the corners (league 25.9%). Run shooters off the corner line first.
• Rim-pressure offense: 31.2% of attempts at the rim vs league 28.4%. Wall building beats switching small.
• Keldon Johnson is a genuine shot-maker: +2.3 pts/100 above expectation after empirical-Bayes shrinkage; contest even the bad shots.
• Best shot diet: Victor Wembanyama (1.17 xPPS on 1080 FGA). The value is where the shots come from; deny the spot, not the release.
• Their most-used five that wins its minutes: H. Barnes - D. Fox - J. Champagnie - V. Wembanyama - S. Castle (+19.9/100 over 287 possessions).

Shot profile vs league

* xPPS prices where they shoot from, independent of whether shots fell: the stable, scoutable part of the profile (year-over-year r ≈ .9).

Personnel (top 8 by volume)

EB making = shot-making regressed to league mean by reliability: the number to trust. RAPM from the opponent-adjusted 2025-26 lineup model (±≈3/100 CI at a season of minutes; treat as descriptive).

Most-used lineups