It’s hard not to feel like you’re watching a mirage during some of these games. The level of play is excellent and the bits and pieces you might be tempted to pick at are scarce. The wins are piling up. The vibes are good. Everything is going according to plan. Nothing to see here…right?
Right! Look, I’m not going to even try to play devil’s advocate here. No one wants to be the guy pointing at the Alien dropping 40 and 11 over 25 minutes and saying, “actually, this is bad.” If that’s a take you’d
like to read then I can assure the internet is full of people willing to take you up on the offer. For my part, and if you’ve come to this website today, I’m assuring you, I genuinely find it hard to think of a less interesting angle to come at this from.
Victor Wembanyama is simply brilliant. He’s been brilliant, he’s brilliant now, and he only seems to be getting more brillianter as we go along. Twelve of his fifteen made shots on Monday were dunks or layups, and nine of those were dunks. Four different teammates threw him an alley-oop. The Spurs are running a dizzying array of different motions that all end up at the same destination, which is a Wembanyama dunk. The threes, instead of feeling like something he has to do to open up the lane, now just arrive in the natural rhythm of the game. He made two threes all night, a digestif tacked on at the end of a satisfying meal.
Vic even hit a Dream Shake in the middle of the 2nd quarter that left me staring off in the distance in disbelief.
I sometimes try to avoid writing about the Victor Wembanyama of it all when I do these because it feels too easy. What did we learn from the Spurs win? They still have the best player on the planet and he helps a lot. Case closed. To his credit, he goes out of his way to make ignoring him next to impossible.
The problem, if there is one, is that regular season basketball does actually seem easy for him at this point. That’s not a mirage. I have no doubt about how hard he’s worked to achieve the level he’s currently operating on, but that doesn’t change the fact that watching him dismantle the average NBA team every other night doesn’t look very challenging. He’s like Will Hunting ranting at Professor Lambeau about how easy it is to solve those supposedly impossible graph theory equations.
Victor’s ascension this season is impressive, and I want to do my best to appreciate the casual brilliance we are privy to on a regular basis, but that greatness comes at a cost, and that cost is a raised ceiling. I simply don’t care that he can drop 50 on the Mavs or 40 on the Suns. I don’t care that he can snuff out the Blazers. I’m sure there will be another jaw-dropping stat line on Wednesday when he plays the Bulls, and I’m sure it will be met with another polite nod from me.
None of this is his fault, mind you. The schedule is the schedule and the teams are the teams. He’s taking care of business, and that’s all you can really ask of him.
I guess I’ve just spent the last nine games of this winning streak telling myself I still don’t know what I’m looking at and I really believe anyone who tells you they do is lying. The ease with which they are winning these games is real. Every conclusion we draw from it…well, that’s a little more hazy. I try to grab on to things I know. “The Spurs are Good.” “The Suns are Bad.” “Wemby is Tall,” and project out from there but I end up feeling like I’m chasing the ghost of a conclusion. The idea of a resolution instead of an actual one.
This is a champagne problem at most. Like, what, I’m having a bad time because I can’t tell if the Spurs are great, really great, or generationally amazing? A few years ago we were sitting through a sixteen-game losing streak and then an eighteen-game one, on our way to the lottery again and again. Now I’m hemming and hawing because our first brush with success last spring has got me feeling antsy.
The thing I’m dancing around here is that the Finals loss is an albatross around our necks that we’re just going to have to wear. There’s no two ways about it. I’m encouraged by the things I’m seeing from this new three-guard- Hydra, but I won’t feel comfortable until I know it can outscore Jalen Brunson when he’s going Nuclear. I love that Victor seems more calm and assured in his decision making, but I still have nightmares about KAT finding a way to neutralize him. Every time we race out to a lead this season, my brain remembers the blown leads in June.
The context of the past clouds everything from the present and I don’t think there’s an easy fix for that feeling. It shouldn’t sully our enjoyment of the current moment, but it does ground the results in a certain reality.
All of this is certainly real enough, but none of it really matters.
Not yet.
Takeaways
- I don’t feel qualified to talk about what Dylan Harper is doing. It’s a level of basketball that I recognize as great but have difficulty quantifying, because my analysis tends to err on the side of “oh my God, how did he do that?” Nuance exits the room when he has the ball in his hands. There is a grace and fluidity to his game that is hypnotic, whether he’s getting to the basket with relative ease or casually spinning into a midrange jumper. I don’t know how to say this as a compliment, but it’s fascinatingly boring to watch. He’s operating at breakneck speed but still in complete control, sort of like how F1 cars can look a little blah during a race until you blink and realize they’re going like 200 mph.
- The caveat with Dylan is, obviously, his youth. It’s simultaneously the most exciting and frustrating thing about him. That control I just alluded to can prove elusive sometimes. Sometimes he seems almost like he’s just watching the game happen to him and forgets that he’s more than capable of grabbing the reins. He started the game last night a little bit adrift. Whether that’s a byproduct of the three-guard lineup’s growing pains or him simply sitting back and watching Wemby cook like the rest of us, he was kind of invisible, and a guy like Harper just shouldn’t be invisible. After the game, Mitch talked about calling him out specifically during a timeout in the 3rd, and that wake-up call seemed to snap him back into place. He absolutely torched the Suns in that 3rd quarter, going 6-of-8 from the field and effectively putting the game out of reach after Phoenix briefly tried to make a run. He is, without a doubt, the 2nd best player on the team from a talent perspective, and that this already kinda feels indisputable is the most shocking thing of all.
- It would’ve been so easy to just write off De’Aaron Fox this season, as evidenced by that fact that so many people did, in fact, write him off. But he’s been really fun to watch so far this year. I love the way he fits into the similar but different skill sets of our guards, and he seems a little more freed up now that Harper and Castle can take on more responsibility. He’s still so fast and he still has great vision, and last night he finished with 15 points, six assists and nine rebounds. His chemistry with Wembanyama has only gotten better, with four of those six assists going to Wemby, and their propensity for lobs and oops of all types seems to have rubbed off on everyone around them. It’s kind of exactly what you would want from a veteran leader in the starting lineup. Everyone else is right though, the Spurs probably should’ve just shipped him last summer because everyone on Twitter was mad.
- This pass was so stupid, lol, I love it.
WWL Postgame Press Conference
Are you ever going to stop having an existential crisis about the Spurs this season?
Are you kidding? My entire brand is “existential crisis about the Spurs.” What would I even write about if not that?
You could analyze the gameplay? Trending stats? Maybe break down different plays the offense runs? Talk about defensive schemes?
You sound insane right now. Completely bonkers.
I just think people come here trying to figure out what they learned from the game and you’re only even talking about the journey through the dark night of the soul you went through on a random Monday. We’re eleven games into the season! You don’t want to, like, build to that?
Shooters shoot. I’m not going to lie to the readers about the fact that I can’t sit still and watch Wembanyama dunk on dudes without stressing about the inexorable march of time or whatever.
I’m not asking you to lie, but also, like, can you not sit still and just watch Wembanyama dunk on dudes without stressing about the inexorable march of time or whatever? Like, are you incapable of doing that?
Is that bad?
It’s not…great.
Well.
Yeah.
He did dunk pretty good last night.
He dunked very good last night.
