It's like Victor Wembanyama has been here before.
Dec. 28, 2024, was a cold and drizzly morning in New York. Wembanyama had some spare time before the San Antonio Spurs' charter flight would leave for Minnesota that afternoon, so he posted a message on social media: Come meet me in Washington Square Park to play chess, he wrote.
He played four games that morning: two wins, two losses.
Fast forward to now, where the Spurs and Oklahoma City are playing
a different form of chess — the Western Conference finals, with Game 5 set for Tuesday night on the Thunder's home floor. The score to this point, just like that morning in New York: two wins, two losses.
Spurs coach Mitch Johnson and Thunder coach Mark Daigneault have both likened the back-and-forth of this series to a chess match, where outthinking one's opponent is just as important as outplaying them. And Wembanyama, who often travels with his own chess set, appreciates that parallel.
“There’s definitely similarities, as in any strategy game,” Wembanyama said after San Antonio’s series-tying 103-82 romp on Sunday night. “It’s fun. It’s very fun. In the playoffs at some point, especially when a series drags on, everybody knows the other team almost by heart. ... I would say the coaches hold a lot of this load of the chess match, the coaching staff, all the strategy, it’s a lot.”
Nobody is in position to declare "checkmate" quite yet: San Antonio took Game 1, Oklahoma City took Games 2 and 3, the Spurs won Game 4. The combined numbers to this point: the Spurs have outscored the Thunder 446-442, the Spurs are shooting 43%, the Thunder are shooting 42%. Not every game has been close — the Thunder won Game 3 by 15, the Spurs won Game 4 by 21 — but the series, as a whole, couldn't be too much closer.
“The series is 2-2 and basically zero-zero and it’s first to two games now,” Thunder guard and two-time reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. “I mean, it’s not at the front of our mind, but it is a fact and it is the reality of where we are.”
These two franchises splitting the first four games in the West finals should have been expected. They also met in the 2012 and 2014 West title matchups — and both of those series also were tied at 2-2 through four games, with the Thunder eventually winning in 2012 and the Spurs eventually winning in 2014.
This is also the seventh time teams that won at least 62 games in the regular season have gone head-to-head in the postseason. Of the previous six series, three of them were knotted at 2-2 going into Game 5.
And in each of those — Chicago-Utah in the 1997 finals, Boston-Los Angeles Lakers in the 1985 finals and Lakers-Milwaukee in the 1972 West finals — the Game 5 winner also won Game 6 to take the series.
“Nothing from (Sunday) will carry over in Game 5,” Daigneault said. “That's a blank slate. We have the same exact opportunity that they do to go get that game. So, we've got to win the gaps between the game right now. We've got to get recovered, get ourselves mentally back to zero, learn the lessons from (Game 5) that we can apply forward and get ourselves ready to go.”
It should surprise nobody that Spurs president — and former coach — Gregg Popovich still knows his way to the locker room.
When San Antonio lost Game 3, Popovich made a surprise appearance in the room after the game. All the Spurs players were there, all the coaches, general manager Brian Wright, athletic trainers and more.
Popovich had to step down from coaching after a stroke in 2024. The actual volume of his voice isn't what it once was. But his messages, when he chooses to deliver them, still seem to resonate quite loudly within the organization.
“Pop’s been around throughout the course of the season, but that was the first time he walked into the locker room and was like, ‘Nah, that’s BS. That’s not how we play basketball,’” Spurs guard De'Aaron Fox said in a televised postgame interview on NBC. “And obviously, he had some choice words for it, but that was the first time all season that he came into the locker room right after a game and told us how he felt. And everybody felt that.”
The Spurs trailed by one point three different times early in Game 4, the last of those at 8-7. San Antonio scored the next 16 points to take control and keep it for good.
Maybe Pop's a pretty good chess player, too.
“When you get into these series, we spoke pregame about the chess match and you can get into a little bit of a whirlwind in terms of, ‘Do I adjust and counter?’ or ‘Do I just want to do it better?’" Johnson said. “And both answers are right.”
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