Let’s bring it back full circle, baby.
The last time the San Antonio Spurs were genuinely feared in the Western Conference, Kawhi Leonard was arguably the most dangerous two-way player on the planet and the Warriors were the only thing standing between San Antonio and another dynastic chapter. Then came the 2017 Western Conference Finals when Kawhi’s tender ankle buckled on Zaza Pachulia’s foot, the series ended before it really started, and a dynasty died in the cruelest possible way. Not in a Game
7 or in a shootout. On a hardwood floor in Oakland, in a moment that still makes Spurs fans go quiet.
We always knew the Spurs would come back though. That is what San Antonio does. And they roared back last night in the Western Conference Finals when that young team walked into the building of the reigning champions and refused to blink.
Now here is the part that should genuinely terrify the rest of the league. Victor Wembanyama is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. Dylan Harper is 20. Most contenders spend their first deep playoff run figuring out whether they belong. The Spurs spent theirs taking the entire conference and breaking their back over their knee. They are not arriving on schedule. They are arriving ahead of it, and that gap between expectation and reality is exactly what makes San Antonio dangerous right now.
What their coach Mitch Johnson built this season should not exist yet, with a locker room where the future is old enough to rent a car but not old enough to remember most of Tim Duncan’s championships. And somehow they walked into Oklahoma City and took a Game 7 from the defending champs. Julian Champagnie, 22 years old, made six threes and scored 20 points when the Spurs needed someone fearless to be exactly that. De’Aaron Fox, the veteran in the room at 28, steadied a group of 20-year-olds when the crowd was shaking the walls. Keldon Johnson drained back-to-back threes in the fourth quarter to end any real conversation about a Thunder comeback. And Luke Kornet materialized out of nowhere to block an Isaiah Hartenstein dunk with six minutes left, a play Champagnie called the biggest of the entire game, a play that took all the life out of the building and ended OKC’s last real hope.
That is not talent alone. That is a team that trusts each other completely.
And at the center of all of it stands Wembanyama. He finished Game 7 with 22 points, seven rebounds, and went 3-for-5 from three in a game where OKC needed stops more than oxygen. For the series he averaged 27.3 points, 10.9 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 2.7 blocks and 1.4 steals, shot 40 percent from deep, and held Chet Holmgren, an All-NBA selection this season, to two shot attempts and four points in the deciding game. The Spurs were plus-62 with him on the court across the entire series. He became the first player in playoff history to record at least 15 made threes and 15 blocks in a single series. He imposed his will on a championship-level opponent and made it look inevitable.
After punching their ticket Saturday night, Wembanyama said winning the Larry O’Brien Trophy feels like the meaning of his life. Then he said he wants to do this fifteen or twenty more times. The man is 22 and already addicted to the feeling of winning.
That is a potential dynasty in its first chapter. This is the first time the Spurs have reached the Finals since 2014, the first time without Gregg Popovich on the bench, the first time without Tim Duncan on the roster. The organization did not just rebuild. It remembered who it was, found arguably the most gifted big man the sport has ever produced, and got back to the promised land faster than anyone thought possible.
That is what five championships of institutional knowledge looks like when it finally has the right pieces again. They’re only four wins away from completing one of the most remarkable organizational resurrections in professional sports history The West belongs to San Antonio right now!
The only question left is whether the Knicks got the memo.
