I don’t think I’ve ever lived through a game quite like that.
Given that no team in NBA playoff history has ever been down 17 points at halftime only to go on and win by 21, I’m pretty sure no one else has either. I’m still sitting here not entirely sure what we just watched. My whole bread and butter as a writer is to come in here and compare Spurs stuff to other stuff, you know? I like making connections. “Wembanyama is a gravitational force” or “being back in the playoffs is a homecoming” or “losing
Game 2 felt like falling on an icicle and bleeding out while the murder weapon disappears in front of your eyes.” Normal stuff like that.
But I’m struggling here because the Spurs’ performance in Game 4 doesn’t really have an analog in my brain. It wasn’t some sort of magical hero story. They weren’t a phoenix rising from the ashes, nor were they some epic underdog comeback story. The Spurs weren’t Rocky training in the snow to fight the Russian. If anything, the Spurs were the Russians! The end result shouldn’t have surprised anyone, and yet how we got there was so astonishing that it felt like skipping a few pages of your book and needing to go back and reread.
It wasn’t like the Spurs came out flat. We’ve seen that move, hell, we’ve seen it twice in this series. The first quarter was fine! A little sluggish maybe, but fine. The kind of opening half-quarter where you think “okay, we’re just getting our legs under us.” Wembanyama showed an appropriate, expected amount of rust. The Blazers were showing an appropriate, expected amount of resilience. It just looked like two teams feeling each other out, waiting to see who would make the first move.
Look, the second quarter was bad. I won’t sit here and pretend otherwise. It was a weird experience though, because it unraveled so fast that I almost didn’t have time to be properly miserable about it. One minute we were tied, then we were down seven, then nineteen. I wasn’t done processing Steph going back to the locker room to get X-rays before Dylan was on the ground holding his hand and Avdija was draining a corner three and Mitch was calling a timeout. I was stunned, but I wasn’t scared yet.
And somehow, that’s exactly what it looked like from the Spurs’ side too. It almost felt more like watching a nature documentary than a basketball game. The Blazers were bounding across the savannah showing incredible feats of agility and speed. You’re almost rooting for the gazelle, you know? Come on bud! You got this! But no, they don’t got this. They never really did.
In Game 2, when things got scary, you could feel the team feel it too. They didn’t necessarily play scared, but they played like a cornered animal. Claws out, burning bright, furious and a little desperate. They reacted to the traumatic event of Wembanyama going down with what seemed like an appropriate amount of desperation. It was almost beautiful in its own way, but it was clearly unsustainable even as it was happening. The final score reflected as much.
The Blazers mounting their big lead may not have been a fun watch for those of us at home, but it was clearly not a traumatic event on the court. The Spurs never once looked like a team that thought it was in trouble. They never deviated from the game plan, they just turned the volume up. The defense that was good in the first half became suffocating in the second. The offense that was functional became surgical. It felt like for two straight quarters every single Spurs basket came off a dunk or a wide open three. They effectively drowned out the noise without ever looking bothered.
Whenever people talked about the Spurs’ chances in the postseason, the same refrain kept coming up: “The playoffs are a different animal.” Sunday didn’t settle that debate by any means, but it offered up an interesting wrinkle.
This version of the Spurs, the one where they become an apex predator, it only existed in theory. Somewhere down the road, after more playoff miles and more hard lessons. They were supposed to show you this later. Instead, we got a glimpse of it on Sunday. We saw them stare down a huge deficit, in a hostile building, against a talented, tough, physical team fighting for its life. We saw what this group is capable of, and we saw it somewhere it very much counted.
The playoffs certainly are a different animal. The Spurs just might be one too.
Takeways
- I will never, ever get over how fast they got this lead back. I don’t even want to look up the actual timestamps of anything because there was a certain magic, a certain rhythm to it in my own personal head canon that I never want to lose. They were so down at the half and then they weren’t. They were losing…and then they weren’t. It was so over, and then we were so back. It felt like a blink. A whisper. A snap of the fingers. How? I mean, really, how?? No, no, don’t tell me. A magician never reveals his secrets.
- There was a specific stretch spanning the last few minutes of the third quarter and the opening of the fourth that felt like Castle and Wembanyama decided to just take matters into their own hands. Castle threw lobs up and Wemby threw them down. Over and over and over. They did it off screens and from out of bounds. They did it in transition. They just kept hammering the Blazers with it and you could feel Portland shrinking a little further every time. The game wasn’t even over at that point, but it sort of was, you know? It felt like the Spurs showing what they could do on every single possession if they needed to and it’d be a lot easier for everyone if they just went away quietly.
- Any playoff run is going to be made up of lots of little things. Little moments. Little decisions. Little turns that end up mattering more than you think. I felt that way about Mitch Johnson’s decision to leave Castle in after he picked up his 4th foul in the 3rd quarter. I was annoyed when the whistle blew, because it was obvious that the foul would be on Steph and the logical thing would be to pull him immediately and lean on the fact that the Spurs’ depth at the guard position is one of our strong suits. I wanted him to stay. In my head I was like, “don’t do it Mitch” and sure enough he didn’t. He looked at our 20-year-old budding superstar and basically said, “I trust you to keep doing what you’re doing.” Steph’s intensity felt like the primary engine of the comeback the Spurs were mounting and I loved that Mitch chose not to interrupt that. The Blazers were probably dying for Steph to get pulled and instead he stayed right there, getting in Avdija’s grill, chasing down rebounds, pushing the pace, and unleashing Wemby offensively. It’s one of those hard decisions coaches have to make in the playoffs and I loved seeing that both Mitch and Steph seemed up to the challenge.
- This is maybe a melancholy note, but it can’t be all fun and games around here all the time, can it? I felt a strange sort of sadness early in the game when they flashed the graphic about Castle and Harper joining Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook as the only duos age 21 or younger to each score 25+ points in the same playoff game. It’s obviously a wonderful indicator that those two are going to be great players because without a doubt, KD and Russ are great players who have had great careers. They’ve also, without a doubt, had really weird ones. Their magical run with the Thunder resulted in zero titles. Those two have then combined to play for ten different teams. Ten! Russ played out an anonymous season in Sacramento this year. KD is doing…whatever it is he’s doing in Houston right now. I think the comparison just sort of felt striking to me because, you know, the arc of an NBA player’s career these days can be really long and the idea of building out a core like Tim, Tony and Manu who just hang out in San Antonio winning championships and being a family forever feels increasingly like a foreign concept in the modern NBA. I say all of this not necessarily to bring us down or whatever, but more just to highlight that we’re living in a very cool period of time right now. Never ever strop enjoying it. Devon made a point in his Game 3 piece to say that “sometimes in life we do get to know exactly when we’re living in a special moment,” and that continues to ring true with each passing game. We don’t know what the future holds for these guys, which makes it feel even more urgent to savor the present.
- Actually, we can’t end on that, let’s watch the most dominant big man in the game throw down an alley oop real quick, how about that?
WWL Post Game Press Conference
You mentioned early on that you like “comparing Spurs stuff to other stuff.” Is that a technical term you learn in school? Comparing stuff to stuff?
Listen pal, you try comparing stuff to stuff sometime. It’s not easy!
You say you’re struggling with it and then proceed to do it for like 1000 more words. It can’t be that hard.
It’s hard to lift a car over your head but when people proceed to do it, the proper response is usually to be like, “wow, that’s so impressive! Congrats on the enormity of your success!”
Are you equating comparing the Spurs to the villain from Rocky IV to lifting a car over your head?
Maybe not, but doing it while also framing the Spurs as the good guys of this particular narrative? Not a lot of people in this industry have the talent to pull something like that off.
Yeah, you shoved a square peg through the circle hole. Congrats.
Look at you comparing stuff to other stuff!
