Watching the San Antonio Spurs play these days means internally negotiating between what feels real and what doesn’t. Possessions, quarters, games string together while present and future timelines crash into one another. It’s a cognitive dissonance not unlike reintegration sickness. This team has seemingly dismantled what looked to be an indestructible Oklahoma City Thunder framework, winning three games (emphatically!) against the defending champions in the span of 12 days; this team has also yet to establish a true baseline for itself due to various injuries to its core quartet in Victor Wembanyama, De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper. San Antonio’s still figuring things out, yet it boasts one of the five best records in the league.
The Spurs, in that sense, already take after their franchise cornerstone. There is tangible proof on film that this team has what it takes to win a championship this year, based solely on the fact that they were able to throttle OKC on multiple occasions in a way that no other team has come close to. On Christmas, in front of a captive national audience, the Spurs created an avatar of themselves—an idealized version of who they are becoming, a glimpse into the not-so-distant future. But progress, no matter how ecstatic, isn’t linear. It recoils and lurches. Five games into the regular season, Wembanyama looked like he might’ve been the best basketball player in the world, and then he didn’t. Three wins over the Thunder don’t exactly make the Spurs transitive property champions, but they do set a new standard to live up to. The Spurs are discovering in real time just how difficult it is to consistently operate at that level.
“The world talks,” head coach Mitch Johnson said after the team’s loss to the Jazz on Sunday. “We weren’t as good as they said we were after Christmas.”
The regression didn’t take long to set in. San Antonio has been smacked with back-to-back double-digit losses in the immediate aftermath of their statement wins over OKC. “It looked like we had an extreme amount of anxiety on offense,” Johnson said after the Spurs’ 113-101 loss to the Cavaliers on Monday. Makes sense. Anxiety is what happens when you fixate on possible futures in the present.
The Spurs’ two-game skid has coincided with Wemby’s reintroduction into the starting lineup after missing 12 games due to a calf strain and then playing seven games off the bench (all wins, except the NBA Cup final). Wembanyama’s stat lines in those two losses have been excellent, but there is a sense that he’s looking to make up for lost time out there. A frantic energy permeates his movements. He’s getting ahead of himself on unbalanced drives and forcing passes into nonexistent windows. There is an underlying pressure to dictate flow as a starter, as opposed to inhabiting a preexisting one as a reserve. “When you come off the bench, the game already has a dynamic,” Wemby said on Monday night. “It's just different on how you can impact the game, how substitutions can impact the game or a certain player stepping up.”
That’s where the anxiety comes into play: The Spurs raised their floor by bringing Wemby back slowly, the minutes constraints forcing him to focus on his help defense and rim deterrence—aspects of the game that he is already the best in the world at. But he nor the Spurs can discover their ceilings if he doesn’t continue forcing the issue and exploring the outer limits of his ability, even if it disrupts the flow the rest of the Spurs worked to cultivate in his absence. The Spurs already proving to be among the league’s elite—when Wemby, Harper, and Castle are all still 21 years old or younger—makes it one of the most fascinating team-building case studies in NBA history. Could San Antonio conceivably operate in a win-now mode while simultaneously conducting experiments that could very well determine the future of basketball?
It’s an unprecedented position to be in, which invariably leads to diverging schools of thought on the path forward. Ever since the Spurs had the fortune of selecting Harper with the no. 2 overall pick in June, there have been questions about the long-term vision for the backcourt spots, of which there can only ever be two available on the floor between three cornerstone players in Fox, Castle, and Harper. (The trio has shared the court for just one minute all season.) But through the lens of their season series with the Thunder, that could be a feature, not a bug. Under the right auspices, the Spurs have assembled an unrivalled collection of guards who generate pressure at the rim, each with a different style.
Fox has long been pigeonholed as the most likely to be traded, by virtue of his advanced age relative to the other protostars on the roster, but there might not be an offensive player more integral to the Spurs’ win-now ambitions. He kept the ship afloat while all three of Wemby, Castle, and Harper were recovering from injury in November, ramping up his usage and output to levels we hadn’t seen in years. No one else on the team (or in the league for that matter) blends drag-race speed with curvilinear flexibility quite like Fox. And the calculus of defending him on drives has only gotten more complex this season. Fox is not only hitting 3s at the highest clip of his career, but the majority of his deep balls have been self-created out of pick-and-roll actions. He’s the only player on the team who can reliably pull-up from behind the arc; it is genuinely difficult to imagine San Antonio maintaining its offensive efficiency without that ideal combination of rim pressure and pull-up shooting. The two-man chemistry between Fox and Wemby hasn’t quite ignited yet, but there is latent potential to be mined given the amount of gravity each player commands.
Castle and Harper are kindred spirits on offense, blending strength-based drives with intuitive change-of-pace dynamics. Castle has more vertical pop—the sturdy, enduring countenance of his forays to the rim belie the weightlessness of his elevation. If any player has figured out their chemistry with Wemby during this reinstallation period, it’s been Castle, who has seemingly been good for one jaw-dropping Area 51 lob per game. Harper may not have the same punch explosively, but he has his own superpowers. He has the footwork of a 10-year vet, with a savant-level intuition for how to vary his strides to slip past his defender before turning on the afterburners at the last possible moment. Castle is the battering ram, Harper the circumnavigator.
But successful drives can be hard to come by with faulty wiring. It’s been an adjustment for all of the guards as Wembanyama has reacclimated to the game—for all of the preposterous abilities that Wemby’s dimensions have afforded him, screen-setting might be one of its biggest curses. Wembanyama has to hunch and crouch to maintain the leverage, breadth, and fortitude required to dislodge a defender, which creates a delay in his ability to roll effectively. Offseason pickup and shiesty enthusiast Luke Kornet has been exemplary in his duties as a wheel-greaser on pick-and-rolls in Wemby’s stead; the implementation of more “French Vanilla” lineups may be a key determining factor in the second half of the season.
If there is a legitimate concern and area of need in the offense, it’s sustainability from behind the arc. The 3-ball, so essential to keeping the team afloat during Wembanyama’s recovery from a left calf strain in November, has vanished of late: only the Toronto Raptors have shot worse from 3 over the past five games. Devin Vassell, Harrison Barnes, and Julian Champagnie have all seen their percentages freefall since the NBA Cup final; both Castle and Harper shoot no better than 27 percent from 3. It’s had a compounding effect on the offense as a whole. When the release valves are tapped out, driving lanes quickly turn into dead ends. Given the sharp peaks of the season thus far, it’s hard to imagine the Spurs making any blockbuster moves, but the team ought to be scouring the trade market for affordable shooters for both the short and long haul.
Ultimately, these growing pains are natural for any emerging team, and the Spurs deserve the benefit of the doubt given how resilient they’ve been amid a number of key injuries over the past two months. But that tension between present and future exists in the beholder, too. Christmas Day felt like a watershed moment, something that couldn’t be put back in Pandora’s Box. There is something about these Spurs that invites—even provokes—that kind of rush to anointment. Maybe it’s just how the stars aligned. San Antonio gets its NBA Cup rematch tonight against the New York Knicks, a team with an identical record to the Spurs, in a not-inconceivable Finals preview. These marquee games matter, if only to build upon the moment.
Recurrence and familiarity are how patterns are recognized. It’s what great rivalries are born of. And there’s more on the horizon. The Spurs and Thunder played thrice in the span of 12 days; they will play again in two weeks, on January 13, then again three weeks after that. Be it by fate or expert scriptwriting, this season’s NBA Cup semifinal between the Spurs and Thunder has set into motion a narrative arc for the NBA that moves beyond whatever feelings of primitive dread that OKC instilled as recently as two weeks ago. It’s a saga between the league’s two biggest team-building anomalies over who gets to set the rules of engagement for 29 other teams. Five regular-season meetings, and a potential best-of-seven in their near future. The potential for 12 bouts in a single season is how you kickstart a league-defining rivalry. It’s how you lead off the next chapter of the sport.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Of course we are. The Spurs are a young, flawed team nonetheless skating on the edge of unprecedented potential. It’s only natural to consider the possibilities, both now and later.
