<\/p>\n
San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama (1) takes a breath during a break in game play during the second quarter of game five of the NBA Championship at Frost Bank Center on Saturday, June13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Sam Owens\/San Antonio Express-News<\/p>\n
Victor\u00a0Wembanyama laments that \u201cthere\u2019s probably 100 games\u201d before the Spurs can make it back to the NBA Finals.<\/p>\n
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That\u2019s if everything goes right.<\/p>\n
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And it\u2019s only if they can make history irrelevant again.<\/p>\n
You probably shouldn\u2019t put it past them. A team that defied all the supposed limits of youth and a half-century of conventional basketball wisdom on its way to mid-June will not be inclined to worry about what the last decade of the NBA suggests about the Spurs\u2019 next hurdle.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s a reason people are telling them not to take what they just accomplished for granted.<\/p>\n
It will be harder to do it the next time.<\/p>\n
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When the next NBA season opens in October, Wembanyama and the Spurs will be contenders again, and they might be the odds-on favorites to win it all. That, however, comes with a different kind of pressure and a different path than the one they just navigated. It also comes with the knowledge that they\u2019re trying to do something that no other team has done in the 2020s.<\/p>\n
Remember all of the up-and-coming superpowers the league has produced in recent years? The stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jayson Tatum, Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who, once they made it to the NBA Finals, were sure to return?<\/p>\n
Not the next year, anyway.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s been well documented that this is the first eight-season stretch in NBA history in which eight different teams have been crowned as champions, but it goes deeper than that. Since the championship series began in 1947, there\u2019s never been another eight-year period in which no team has managed even to make the Finals in back-to-back seasons.<\/p>\n
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San Antonio Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox (4) guards New York Knicks guard Jalen Brunson (11)during the second quarter of game five of the NBA Championship at Frost Bank Center on Saturday, June13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Sam Owens\/San Antonio Express-News<\/p>\n
San Antonio Spurs forward Carter Bryant (11) celebrates a call during the second quarter of game five of the NBA Championship at Frost Bank Center on Saturday, June13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Sam Owens\/San Antonio Express-News<\/p>\n
San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama (1) pauses between plays during Game 5 of the NBA Finals at Frost Bank Center in San Antonio on Saturday, June 13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Katina Zentz\/San Antonio Express-News<\/p>\n
San Antonio Spurs guard Dylan Harper (2) brings the ball up the court as New York Knicks guard Mikal Bridges (25) guards him during the fourth quarter of game five of the NBA Championship at Frost Bank Center on Saturday, June13, 2026.<\/p>\n
Sam Owens\/San Antonio Express-News<\/p>\n
But such is the period of parity the league is in now. Since Golden State lost to Toronto in 2019, ending a run of five consecutive Finals appearances, 14 teams have tried to run it back after winning their conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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None of those 14 teams looked quite like the Spurs do, and not all of them had to give up their championship dreams for good. The Warriors (2019 and 2022), Heat (2020 and 2023) and Celtics (2022 and 2024), for instance, each made the Finals twice in the last eight years. It\u2019s just that each of those three teams had to take at least one gap year between those runs.<\/p>\n
There might be a reason for that. In much the same way that an uptick in soft-tissue injuries has been attributed in part to the NBA\u2019s unprecedentedly frenetic pace of play, it\u2019s at least conceivable that those factors could make it especially difficult for teams to mount a pair of two-month playoff runs over a 14-month period.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In each of the past two seasons, the defending champion has been forced to finish its postseason without a key player from the year before. In 2025, the Celtics lost Tatum to an Achilles injury. Last month, the Thunder played most of a seven-game conference finals series against San Antonio without a banged-up Jalen Williams.<\/p>\n
So staying healthy will be the Spurs\u2019 first order of business, and that\u2019s where the youth of Wembanyama, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper could be an asset. None of those guys have accumulated anything close to the same kind of mileage that, say, LeBron James had on his legs after winning the title in 2020, or that Steph Curry or Jokic had by the time they won their last titles.<\/p>\n
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But youth doesn\u2019t make you immune from injuries, or from the other issues that can complicate a repeat Finals run. Thus far, we\u2019ve been given no reason to believe that the 20-year-old Harper is anything less than the ultimate team player, or that Julian Champagnie and Devin Vassell are anything less than thrilled with the chance to keep sticking to the roles they filled so brilliantly this postseason.<\/p>\n
What happens, though, when human nature starts to creep in? Will Harper, an absolute playmaking revelation, be content filling Manu Ginobili\u2019s sixth-man role indefinitely? And if not, will whichever starter that gets benched for him be enthusiastic about the reassignment? Or, if the Spurs choose to trade someone like De\u2019Aaron Fox instead, how will they replace that production?<\/p>\n
These are the kinds of questions that franchises have to answer once the afterglow of a Finals trip wears off. Gregg Popovich was fond of saying that no two teams are alike, even when they contain a bunch of the same players. A roster might stay the same. But the context around it changes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s safe to say Mitch Johnson has a plan for this. It\u2019s also fair to assume that, among the 29 other head coaches in the NBA (including those yet to be hired), most would trade their offseason concerns with Johnson\u2019s in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n
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But if Johnson manages it right? The Spurs\u2019 next 100 games will fly by like the last 100 did.<\/p>\n
And they might even lead to another chance, not to be taken for granted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama (1) takes a breath during a break in game play during the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-749519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}