Now’s not their time.
But it’s just a matter of time.
Victor Wembanyama sprinted onto the championship stage earlier than anyone anticipated, showing the basketball world that it’ll soon be in his 7-foot-4 shadow.
But the Spurs came up short in the NBA Finals against the Knicks, a team of destiny who brought a long-suffering fanbase joy with their first championship in 53 years. The Knicks wanted it more. They deeply knew the rarity of this opportunity.
The Spurs are next. Not right now.
Their youth showed at the end of games. Their inexperience was their kryptonite. In a series in which the five games were decided by an average of four points, the little moments had monumental importance.
The Knicks won them, punctuated by a 94-90 win in Game 5. The Spurs led by as many as 16 points, but the Knicks came roaring back. The same old broken record played in crunch time, with the Spurs unraveling and the Knicks showing a lethal combination of poise and impeccable execution. De’Aaron Fox committed a bad foul and Wembanyama and Dylan Harper missed free throws. Jalen Brunson soared with a 45-point performance.
The Spurs could learn a lot from the Knicks.
The Knicks never met a deficit that scared them. They had the pressure of a famished fanbase putting their hopes and dreams on their every possession. They never got too high or too low. They were steady. Unyielding.
Wembanyama tried to be a student in real time.
In his playoff debut, he carried the Spurs within three wins of a championship. There were jaw-dropping moments. There were cringe-worthy mistakes.
We saw Wembanyama explode for 41 points, 24 rebounds and three blocked shots in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals against the Thunder. We saw him cry tears of joy after sending the reigning champions home in Game 7. We heard him acknowledge that he let the emotions of that series linger a bit too long, carrying them into the championship round.
We witnessed him emerge as the Knicks fans’ latest villain. We saw the pain on his face after he committed a turnover with 12.7 seconds left in the Spurs’ 105-104 loss in Game 2. We saw his shock after the Spurs gave up a 29-point lead to allow the Knicks to complete the greatest comeback in Finals history in their 107-106 win in Game 4.
We saw his devastation that the Spurs lost even though they led for 177 minutes, while the Knicks were only ahead for 56 minutes.
Ultimately, the Spurs let games slip through their fingers like grains of sand, while the Knicks clenched their fists with all their might.
“This is the biggest lesson of my life, biggest learning moment,” said Wembanyama, who had 19 points, 14 rebounds and five blocked shots.
Wembanyama is smart. He’s thoughtful. He’s deep. He’s going to internalize this. At one point, he referred to the Spurs as “spoiled kids” for arriving on this stage so quickly. His raw talent and work ethic are undeniable. But there are often other important ingredients needed for a superstar to carry a team to a championship, such as heartache and failure.
He should study Brunson.
The King of New York felt the devastation of falling to the Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals last postseason. In that series, Brunson was too often on the wrong end of Tyrese Haliburton’s last-second heroics. Brunson made sure that this time around, he was the one inflicting the pain.
Bruson was sharpened by disappointment.
Wembanyama will be too.
“What I’m pissed about is that there’s probably a hundred games before we can be back in the Finals,” Wembanyama said. “I don’t know how to say it in English, but I’m going to have to hold that inside of me and slow down and wait and execute for a hundred games.”
The 22-year-old wants to be the face of the league. He needs to win a championship to accomplish that. We saw why he’s the Defensive Player of the Year in Game 5. He held the Knicks to just six points in the paint in the first half before they finished with 30, a far cry from the 50 they had in Game 1.
But all of his efforts seemingly were never enough against the Knicks. This series came down to the minutiae. It was won by centimeters.
The Knicks anticipated that. The Spurs were slapped in the face by that.
Wembanyama is going to be haunted by throwing the ball off Stephon Castle’s back in the final seconds of Game 2. Fox is going to forever regret going for a layup in Game 4 instead of running out the clock.
“We absolutely dominated for most of the series,” Wembanyama said. “But our errors, our mistakes, are punished so hard that we can’t have ups and downs like this.”
Ultimately, the Knicks were too tough. They came through in the clutch. They committed fewer errors.
Wembanyama got his so-called PhD in this series with New York acting as his professor.
This wasn’t just the Finals. It was the Finals against the Knicks. Against a fanbase that lives and breathes blue and orange. Against an underdog team that was playing as though this was their only chance at this.
The lights couldn’t have been brighter. President Donald Trump attended a game. Taylor Swift and Timothee Chalamet danced in the hallways at Madison Square Garden after Game 4. The whole world was watching.
The Spurs weren’t ready for it all.
They were so close.
Yet so far.
In the end, the Knicks were the ones popping champagne. They were the ones with tears of joy welling in their eyes. They were the ones on top of the world.
Meanwhile, the Spurs were left with crushing disappointment.
With nothing but painful lessons.
