Gregg Popovich has often credited his success—a Hall of Fame berth, five championships, and the most wins ever by an NBA coach—to winning the 1997 draft lottery and selecting Tim Duncan. In other words, to dumb luck. To this day, Spurs people toast Duncan at team dinners—“thank you, Timmy”—joking, though not really, that the big fella is responsible for their success, their livelihoods, and the bottle of fine wine on their table.
They’re not wrong, but the Spurs also made their own good fortune by being in the vanguard of several NBA trends. They established an international scouting infrastructure earlier than most teams, and then drafted Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. They sought creative ways and complementary players to extend the careers of their aging Big Three. They embraced the corner 3 before even Daryl Morey. If drafting Duncan was the big bang of the Spurs dynasty, the franchise at least did a remarkable job cultivating the conditions for basketball to thrive.
Those conditions, however, have been tested in recent years, as other teams have caught up and the league has shifted around them. Kawhi Leonard’s trade demand not only waylaid several years of best-laid plans, but also refuted the notion that the metronomic Spurs were immune to the dramatic twists of team-building in the modern NBA. And when San Antonio turned to an antiquated offensive style that leaned heavily on midrange jump shots, it made a certain sense given their personnel but also signaled the limits of cutting-edge thinking in a league increasingly dominated by star-player aggregation. Four straight years of sub-.500 basketball posed some uncomfortable questions. Had it really just been Duncan all along?
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Twenty-three years later, dumb luck has sidled up to Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs once again. Victor Wembanyama, the most tantalizing prospect since LeBron James, will suit up for the silver and black starting tonight against Dallas, tipping off the most exciting season of Spurs basketball since a Zaza Pachulia closeout sounded the death knell for the team in its first season AD (After Duncan).
And just like that, the Spurs are back—on national TV, in the NBA zeitgeist, and, maybe, on course to sustained greatness. It seems impossible that the next 23 years of Spurs basketball could measure up to the previous 23, but it’s just as impossible not to imagine that they could. Earlier this month, over 13,000 fans streamed into San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center for the Spurs’ pre-preseason scrimmage and the chance to catch their first in-person glimpse of Wembanyama. Some even camped out the night before. There were alien masks, countless Wembanyama no. 1 jerseys, and that familiar buzz that comes with the beginning of another season of Spurs basketball.
But this year, that buzz feels different—and Wembanyama’s preseason highlight reel has done nothing to temper it. The anticipation is laced with a fresh curiosity and a sense of wonder. Everyone wants to see what Wemby can do, and nobody wants to miss a moment. With the last couple of seasons excepted, Spurs teams have always been closer to finished products than raw material. Even Duncan and David Robinson arrived in the NBA as older and more polished prospects, ready to lead their teams to immediate success. For as long as I can remember, the joy of Spurs fandom came from the team’s consistency and inevitability, just pounding the rock as challengers rose and fell and contenders were built and dismantled around them. Now, Spurs fans are at the beginning of a new adventure. This season feels like a spelunking expedition into a Wonder Emporium. What will we find?
First, it should be said, often, that Wembanyama isn’t Duncan. They share a position—and, in fact, Wembanyama seems poised to spark Duncan-esque debates about whether he is a power forward or center. But Duncan’s dominance was understated and workmanlike. He could thoroughly dismantle opponents without appearing on the postgame highlight reel, carving them up with such blunt-force instruments as the 12-foot bank shot and exquisite defensive positioning. It will be different for Wembanyama, whose sheer proportions and talent will make even his most fundamental maneuvers appear revolutionary.
Teams often take on the personas of their leaders, and that was certainly true of the Spurs during Duncan’s career. Even as they changed with the times—evolving from a back-to-the-basket post-up factory around Duncan and Robinson to a whirring offensive machine built on movement and the 3-pointer—they never abandoned Duncan’s ethos. Team over individual. Fundamentals and function over style (Manu notwithstanding). Even the franchise as a whole seemed to operate in accordance with its star: private, insular, methodical. This, too, will be different with Wembanyama.
Wembanyama will challenge what has long been the Spurs’ way, both on and off the court. His game is open-ended, while his coach has typically preferred clearly defined roles. He needs freedom and space to explore his abilities, but his team is known for bringing rookies along slowly and incrementally. He is the most anticipated curio in the NBA, but his front office is steadfast in elevating the team’s interests above any responsibility to the league and its fans. And in contrast to the famously private Duncan, Wemby arrives in the NBA with global reach, 2.5 million Instagram followers, and what seems to be a breezy comfort with celebrity.
For Wemby, this season is about getting comfortable—with his teammates, with life in the NBA, with scheme, with different spots on the floor and his preferred ways to attack—while his team will spend it figuring out what kind of team to build around a player unlike any we’ve seen before.
Wembanyama will provide jaw-dropping highlights every time he takes the floor, the sheer variety of which open up all sorts of strategic, stylistic, and roster possibilities. In one defensive sequence during his first preseason game, he stretched all the way from a step inside the 3-point line to the paint to knock the ball away from a Thunder ball handler before leaking out for a dunk on the other end. On offense, he peeled out of a dribble handoff for a leaning 3 on one possession, and on another pirouetted to the hoop for a lefty scoop layup with the grace of a gymnast. When a player can do pretty much everything, how do you complement him? How do you utilize him?
The Spurs took their first major step toward building around Wemby earlier this month, when they inked a five-year, $135 million extension with Devin Vassell, who’s now poised to spend the next half decade–plus as Wembanyama’s running mate. The dollar figure suggests optimism that the fourth-year wing will continue to grow as a defender and creator, but he also already possesses a silky skill set that will fit next to Wembanyama no matter where the 7-footer’s development takes him.
Like the front office and coaching staff, Vassell and the other Spurs must figure out how to work in concert with Wembanyama. For some, that will be a relatively seamless transition. Zach Collins, the team’s versatile but oft-injured and newly extended starting center, has the size, passing, and shooting to protect Wembanyama on one end and keep the floor spaced and ball moving on the other.
The fit between Collins and Wembanyama has meaningful implications for the Spurs’ long-term construction. Jeremy Sochan, whom San Antonio drafted with the ninth pick in 2022, is just the sort of tenacious, instinctive player you’d want next to Wembanyama, but his shaky jump shot makes sliding him down the positional spectrum a shakier proposition. Sochan is a creative and nifty passer who’ll start the year as a jumbo-sized point guard, but his ultimate potential alongside Wembanyama will hinge on his shooting stroke and how effectively he can pick his spots and find gaps on the floor.
For other young Spurs, Wembanyama’s presence will necessitate even more of an adjustment. Keldon Johnson stretched himself during the Spurs’ lean years to become a 20-point scorer and high-volume 3-point shooter, but his fit on the next good Spurs team depends on his ability to recalibrate his game back in favor of the wrecking-ball, downhill pressure he exerted to such great effect in his rookie year. Tre Jones, who signed a new two-year deal this past offseason, had the steadiest hand in last year’s offense, but needs to prove he has the juice to create advantages in addition to keeping things moving. The Spurs expect sophomore guard Malaki Branham, who finished the 2022-23 season strong, to step into more scoring and lead ballhandling duties off the bench, but he’ll need to find ways to impact the game without the ball in his hands. All of these players will face greater scrutiny and higher expectations compared to the relatively directionless experimentation of last season.
San Antonio’s existing young core has plenty of room to grow organically into a contending team, but the Spurs retain several avenues to add to it. After trading Dejounte Murray, Derrick White, and Jakob Poeltl, San Antonio is loaded with draft capital—not to mention primed for another high lottery pick in 2024—which it can use to keep adding youngsters or to trade for a veteran. Many of those picks and swaps are slated for the late 2020s, when Wembanyama will presumably be entering his prime. In one illustrative move from this offseason, the Spurs took on Reggie Bullock and a Mavericks 2030 pick swap in the Grant Williams sign-and-trade—and didn’t even bother to keep Bullock—evincing their patience and long-term-ist approach to building a winner around Wembanyama.
All in all, the Spurs are set up exceedingly well to once again capitalize on their good fortune, but this organization won’t look like it used to. They won’t be boring, but rather new and undefined. They’ll have fans all over the world, and the national spotlight trained upon them. They won’t be content to just rack up wins from their home base in San Antonio; they are actively growing their footprint in Central Texas and Mexico. They just completed a state-of-the-art practice and “performance research” center, and are already exploring opportunities for a new downtown arena.
The Spurs will always be connected to their past, and that’s by design. Popovich, who’s now 74 and fields annual questions about his retirement, just re-upped on a new five-year deal. A coterie of Spurs legends—Duncan, Ginobili, and Robinson, all of whom still spend frequent time around the team—took Wembanyama to dinner as soon as he was drafted. Those links will always remain, but this organization is changing and growing to accommodate both the times and its new star. When Pop said at media day that he and the franchise will “Let Victor be Victor,” he meant both on the court—whatever that looks like—and off it. The promise of Wembanyama isn’t a continuation of this franchise’s greatness, but rather the creation of something new. The parallels to the dynastic years are irresistible, but if all goes according to plan, fans like me will stop leaning on evocations of Duncan and the Spurs of old. It’s Wembanyama’s time now.
