Questions for Projected Spurs Reserve Guards

Questions about the season for the Spurs guards likely to come off the bench.

On Thursday, I wrote a piece examining the upcoming season's questions for the starters on the San Antonio Spurs, which are projected to be De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle, Devin Vassell, Harrison Barnes, and Victor Wembanyama.

As I mentioned in that article, at the end of the season in April, I’ll be revisiting these opening season questions to see what the answers were once the regular season has ended.

Today, I want to shift my focus to season questions for guards off the bench, which include rookie Dylan Harper, veteran Jordan McLaughlin, and two-way guard David Jones Garcia.

Let’s begin with Harper, who is likely to miss all of training camp and the preseason due to a left thumb injury.

---

Dylan Harper

How well is Harper able to adjust to regular-season play when he returns from his thumb injury?

While the Spurs haven’t yet set a date for Harper to return from injury, there were early reports that he might be ready to go as soon as opening night on October 22 in Dallas against the Mavericks.

Whenever Harper can make his NBA debut, it’ll be interesting to see how he’s able to adjust, considering he would have missed training camp and the preseason to not only get his conditioning and dribbling and shooting skill development prepared, but also, he’ll have missed the opportunity to build chemistry with his new teammates. Not only that, he’ll be playing in the best basketball league in the world for the first time, where he only got a sense of what NBA basketball is like in two Summer League games back in July.

By the end of the season, the way I’ll measure Harper’s adjustment is by looking at his first 20 NBA games compared to the rest of his games for the season. If the data is relatively consistent in both timelines, then Harper adjusted well after the injury and new experience. If there’s a stark difference between his first 20 games and then the rest of the season, maybe we can infer that Harper missing those first few weeks of October did have a significant impact on how he began his rookie season.

During the season, can Harper jump into the starting lineup?