I consider myself something of a modern day basketball historian. With the rise of the internet and misinformation, it’s easy for people to get caught up in the hoopla of social media and miss parallels to the past that teach us so much about basketball and life.
That’s what got me thinking about the San Antonio Spurs’ shocking NBA Finals run and their stunning collapse to the New York Knicks.
San Antonio had the Knicks on the ropes in Game 4. Twenty-nine points up. First quarters won by a combined
57 points across the series. Wembanyama blocking shots like he was swatting flies off a porch. And then it slipped, the way these things always slip when a team hasn’t lived through the moment enough times to trust it.
Final result, five games, Knicks banner number four hanging in the Garden by fall. Jalen Brunson walking off with Finals MVP and a stat line that read like a man who’d been rehearsing this exact night since he was a kid shooting in his driveway.The Spurs went home with proof they belong, proof the timeline is real, and, if history is any kind of teacher, proof of how easy it is to waste both.
We’ve seen this movie before. Go back to 2012, a Thunder team built on a rookie scale contract and a prayer, Kevin Durant still growing into his frame, James Harden just getting his beard activated, and Russell Westbrook playing like his hair was on fire. Nobody had that team penciled in for a Finals, and they went anyway, right through the Lakers and the Spurs and the Mavericks.
That’s the part San Antonio just lived. Wembanyama is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. De’Aaron Fox barely got there and is still learning how his game fits inside a team that wasn’t built with him in mind yet. This is a group that shot out of the West at 4-3 over Oklahoma City and took the eventual champion to five games.
Flashback to how Miami unraveled the Thunder. The Heat had LeBron in his prime, Wade still Wade, a roster that had already been humbled once and come back meaner for it. The end result: Heat in five.The lesson OKC took from that series wasn’t written down anywhere, but it should have been tattooed on the locker room wall: young talent might you to the door once. It does not automatically walk you through it again next year, or the year after that, or ever.
That’s exactly where the Spurs are standing right now, whether anyone in that building wants to admit it. San Antonio now knows what it feels like to blow a 29 point lead on a national stage, to watch a grown men in orange and blue outsmart and bully them into playing out of character. You cannot manufacture that kind of film session. You have to bleed for it, and now they have.
Nobody in Oklahoma City believed a fall was coming in the summer of 2012. Why would they? Their core was in their early 20s.The whole basketball world assumed OKC would run it back five or six times over, showing up again and again with more mileage and less rust. Instead the front office traded Harden that same offseason, injuries piled up in the years after, Durant walked in 2016, and that specific version of the Thunder never got back to a Finals. No single move explains all of it. One great run became the assumption instead of the foundation, and everything after that got a little easier to lose.
San Antonio’s got a core this specific, this young, this obviously built around a seven footer who moves like he’s got no business being that big, and the margin between running it back next June and becoming a “remember when” story is razor thin. What happens next comes down to the next fourteen months. The vets they bring in have to teach something instead of just filling a roster spot. This exact group has to get another shot before somebody else’s timeline swallows theirs whole.
History doesn’t owe young, exciting teams a second trip. It only owes them the first one, the trip that gets people talking and eventually ends up in every “remember when” conversation whether or not anything ever comes of it. What happens after that is on them.
Ask the 2012 Thunder how that part goes if you don’t believe me.
