A SWELTERING MUGGINESS masked the air-conditioned chill Thursday afternoon inside Frost Bank Center, where the San Antonio Spurs were reeling from an opportunity lost less than 24 hours prior: letting a late fourth-quarter lead slip away in Game 1 of the franchise’s first NBA Finals appearance since 2014.
For Spurs franchise superstar Victor Wembanyama, the aftermath of the New York Knicks’ 105-95 victory -- the 22-year-old finished with playoff career highs in turnovers (six) and missed shots (15) -- featured a text message from Hall of Fame coach Gregg Popovich. Wembanyama declined to divulge details of the exchange, but he provided the gist.
“It was that I’ve been bad, and I’m better than this,” Wembanyama said.
The game marked the third time this postseason that Wembanyama shot worse than 30% (the Spurs are 0-3 when that happens), while sinking only one of his 13 attempts outside two feet in the final three quarters of Game 1.
Wembanyama said he isn’t “worried in the slightest” about how the team might rebound from a lousy Game 1 performance because of its winding journey throughout the season that brought them here.
In a season that nobody saw coming outside of the team that trains every day at 1 Spurs Way, the loss served as just one more inflection point along a 102-game odyssey chock full of them. It’s why the Spurs remain undaunted in the face of this latest bout with adversity. The way they see it, the rigors of their 2025-26 journey provided more than enough experience to conjure the moxie necessary to dig out of this hole.
“It’s very reassuring,” he said when asked about the team’s resilience born from overcoming so many challenges. “We know we’re not here by chance. We’ve been through some weird, weird, situations [or] whatever. It’s reassuring to know that these guys, the 18 guys we’ve got, are built this way. [They] are resilient.”
TWO DAYS BEFORE the start of training camp in September, the city was buzzing about the return of Wembanyama, who had missed the final 36 games of the previous season due to deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder. Excitement also percolated around the addition of rookie guard Dylan Harper, who was selected No. 2 months earlier.
Still, questions lingered on that steamy 91-degree degree day. The Spurs were coming off a 34-win season, and Wembanyama hadn’t played since Feb. 12 of the 2024-25 season and had just returned from a whirlwind summer jet-setting the globe searching for ways, mentally and physically, to dominate in Year 3 of a promising career. Harper, meanwhile, had undergone surgery 25 days before to repair a partially torn ligament in his shooting thumb, leaving him iffy to start camp.
Even veteran guard De’Aaron Fox, the prized acquisition at last season’s trade deadline, was uncertain for the start of camp due to a strained hamstring suffered in July.
Amid all the chaos, Spurs general manager Brian Wright remained confident in his group.
“I think we’ve got a chance, man,” Wright told ESPN.
“When we were whole last year you saw flashes of it,” he said. “And the bulk of our group is incredibly young. The one thing you could bank on was improvement, whether that be Vic, Steph [Castle], as well as Keldon [Johnson] and Devin [Vassell]. There’s Julian [Champagnie], too. They’re still growing. Just with the evolution of the guys we have and then someone of Fox’s caliber being here in the offseason, there’s a real chance we could match up and play with all the teams at the top of the league. Obviously, you’ve got to do the work. But we believe in the group we have.”
At the time, Harper and fellow rookie Carter Bryant hadn’t played a single minute in the NBA.
That all started first with coach Mitch Johnson, who filled in as interim coach for Popovich in November 2024 after he suffered a stroke. Johnson coached 77 games without a full staff of assistants, “just trying to get through the day, sometimes,” he said, navigating the young Spurs through situations ranging from the wildfires that swept through Southern California last season on a road trip in Los Angeles, to Wembanyama’s diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis.
In those moments, Johnson “didn’t flinch,” according to a source. That opened the eyes of people within the organization to ponder the prospects of the first-time head coach’s potential if given the time to shape the team’s direction in his own way with a full staff of assistants.
Popovich was in the room when the brass delivered the news to Johnson that he would be succeeding the five-time champion coach and three-time NBA Coach of the Year on a full-time basis.
“[Popovich is] a pretty good resource for what I’ve been walking through, since October and up until now,” Johnson said. “I could not have created a better rhythm or build without him being a constant resource for me, but then also totally giving me the freedom and runway to try to roll this thing out in my own reflection as myself. That’s pretty valuable. I don’t know if anyone’s ever had the opportunity that I’ve had this year. I don’t take that for granted. It’s not lost on me the impact he’s had, while also empowering me to be myself.”
THE FIRST GALVANIZING move of this season came against a familiar foe. Champagnie had started in 18 of San Antonio’s first 32 games but didn’t move into the starting lineup over 2015 NBA champion Harrison Barnes, 34, permanently until New Year’s Eve, coincidentally, in a home matchup against the Knicks. The Brooklyn, New York, native delivered a 36-point heater in a Spurs comeback victory, a career high in scoring for the 24-year-old.
The move and subsequent performance served as one of the inflection points in San Antonio’s season. A few weeks prior, the young Spurs fell to the Knicks in the championship of the NBA Cup in Las Vegas on Dec. 16. For most of the team, that 124-113 loss ranked as the biggest game of their careers up to that point.
To get there, San Antonio had dropped Oklahoma City in the semifinals of the NBA Cup, marking the first of three victories over the defending champions over a span of 12 days, including a 15-point triumph on Christmas Day at Paycom Center.
Of course, New York would butt in again with another inflection point to San Antonio’s season. The Knicks halted an 11-game winning streak on March 1 with a dominating 114-89 rout at Madison Square Garden.
“Us losing to the Knicks, I think was great for us,” Fox told ESPN. “We had won [11] games in a row. You’re on a high, feeling yourselves, get your ass kicked, and we talked about it. It was good for us. We come back, and we go on a winning streak again. For us, that brings you closer together. Being in Vegas, I think us making it to Vegas was also great for us. That allowed us to grow together, and it allowed us to know that we have a chance at this. Beating the Lakers in L.A. [on Dec. 10 at the end of a four-game road trip] and then beating OKC, that’s what really kind of ramped this team up even more.”
After the March 1 defeat at New York, the Spurs would finish the regular season losing just four more times while stacking another 19 victories, including 11 in a row from March 14 to April 2.
“They’re growing up right before our eyes,” Wright said at the time.
San Antonio faced more tough times in the postseason, when Wembanyama suffered a concussion in Game 2 of the opening round against the Portland Trail Blazers that forced him to miss Game 3 while in concussion protocol. The Spurs won that series 4-1 but opened the next round with a 104-102 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves at home. After taking a 2-1 series lead in Game 3, Wembanyama played just 12 minutes in Game 4 after being ejected in the second quarter for elbowing Naz Reid in the jaw as the Spurs fell 114-109 to even the series. However, the Spurs prevailed in six games.
Fox missed the first two games of the Western Conference finals against Oklahoma City. Harper suffered a right adductor strain in the third quarter of Game 2. Despite San Antonio falling behind 3-2 against defending champ Oklahoma City to face elimination for the first time in this postseason, the Spurs rallied to win Game 6 at home and Game 7 on the road. Harper and Fox combined for 27 points in the decisive Game 7.
But the Spurs have lost three of four matchups this season against the Knicks.
“We gave ourselves a lot of aspects of the game we need to improve,” Johnson said Thursday after the team’s film session. “It didn’t take too much film or too deep of a dig to find the second-chance points [issue]. It’s clearly one of them. Sixteen assists is not a reflection of this program ever since I’ve been here, and decades before I was.”
Popovich established the “Spurs Way” during an almost 30-year run as head coach that featured unselfish play and eye-popping ball movement. It captivated fans during the team’s last NBA Finals appearance in 2014, when San Antonio bounced the Miami Heat in five games.
San Antonio’s 16 assists in Game 1 against New York were the team’s fewest since 2022 after it ran off a string of 237 consecutive games with at least 20 assists that was broken in late November. Meanwhile, the second-chance points (New York won that battle 23-14) Johnson described galvanized the Knicks’ late run in Game 1.
Yet, nobody donning silver and black on Thursday seemed overly concerned heading into Friday’s Game 2.
“I don’t know if that’s our youth talking,” Castle said. “It might just be more of what our character is like. I don’t think we’ll ever change from being this way, having the kind of confidence [we have] in each other, no matter how young we are. [We’re] using that to our advantage, [in] any kind of situation. We have nothing but confidence in this team, in this staff, in this organization. I think Vic said it best: I don’t think we have anything to be worried about. We feel like we’re the better team.”
