SAN ANTONIO — Most of the San Antonio Spurs roster has never played in a moment of this magnitude.
However, there is one player who has had his back against the wall on the biggest stage and prevailed.
Harrison Barnes trailed LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers 2-1 in the 2015 NBA Finals. He was playing alongside the Golden State Warriors’ generational talent and was getting his first whiff of the air at the mountaintop.
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Barnes can remember what it felt like fighting back. He can remember seeing Steph Curry figure it out as they became champions and an era was born.
Barnes learned then how hard it is to live up to the standard you’ve set for your team when you’re playing against the absolute best with everything on the line.
The Spurs are playing a different sport right now, a roughshod edition of basketball full of vitriol, precision and destruction. The Spurs and Oklahoma City are trying to break each other’s spirits. It’s the clearest factor in the Thunder’s 2-1 Western Conference finals lead over the Spurs after Friday night’s 123-108 win.
The Spurs lost by 15 after starting the game on a 15-0 run. Spirit strained, but broken?
“It’s a matter of saying, ‘Look, however many games the series goes, are we going to play to our standard when we look back at those games?’ ” Barnes told The Athletic. “The last few games, can we have said that? No. And so going into this next game, what is it going to take for us to do that?”
There are many answers to that question. They need to find their offensive pace of play and stick to it, even when things get ugly. Someone besides Devin Vassell has to get shots to fall. They have to get the ball out of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s hands and then keep it out.
However, most importantly, Victor Wembanyama needs to seize the moment.
After his historic performance in Game 1, The Athletic declared him the best player in the world. The Thunder and Gilgeous-Alexander told everyone to hit pause, stringing together a pair of elite defensive performances while the actual MVP strung together a pair of textbook performances.
And that’s the key. SGA is overwhelmingly consistent. He doesn’t have many out-of-this-world performances. He is just very good, constantly, persistently, endlessly.
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Wembanayama is not … yet. He is majestic and paradigm-defying. That’s not enough right now. It’s time to deliver, always. That’s the challenge the Thunder have handed down to him and which he must embrace.
“I feel like I have trouble making my teammates better right now,” Wembanyama said after scoring 26 points, but with just four rebounds, three assists and two blocks. “That’s what I should do better. My shooting splits aren’t terrible. I need to be more of a team player.”
He said he wants to facilitate better, rebound better, push their defense into compromising positions to see how much they’re willing to help off of him and finally get his teammates open shots in rhythm.
Wembanyama is used to doing that the hard way. He makes 10 plays a night that make you blink twice. Three times if he’s really on. But that’s not how you win a championship. Winning a title is meticulous and simple. It takes dozens of solid plays and smart decisions that chip away at an opponent until they crumble.
“Yes, there’ll be times for the magic, right? We saw that Game 1. We’ve seen that in a lot of the plays that (Wembanyama) makes,” Barnes said. “But in the playoffs, it’s hard to do that consistently, every single time. If every single shot is a miraculous high-energy, high-effort, high degree of difficulty shot, it’s going to be hard.”
It has been hard. The Spurs cannot get to those comically easy buckets for Wembanyama that fill up his box score. The lobs, the tip-ins, the spinning duck-ins. All the stuff that requires him to touch the ball for as little time as possible. He does the work of getting the position, and then players like Stephon Castle, De’Aaron Fox and Dylan Harper find him.
That wasn’t in sync in Game 3 or Game 2. The Thunder swarm Wembanyama when he goes toward the paint while also disrupting the dribble penetration that often makes it easy to feed him. He can’t get a good enough position on box outs to clean up misses. He isn’t getting clean catches in the post to quickly draw doubles. None of the usual things that allow Wemby to pile on the pain are working right now.
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“There’s no place for frustration,” Wembanyama said. “It’s annoying, of course, but we’re going to use that as energy.”
Wembanyama said the Thunder’s experience makes them smarter at using their physicality. They did a good job keeping Harper at bay all night as he returned from an adductor injury that took him out in the second half of Game 2. They contested Fox well on his 3-point attempts, though he made a ruckus scoring in the paint when Wembanyama would clear out. Castle was adept at drawing fouls and managed to regain his composure after nearly getting in a fight after an Ajay Mitchell flagrant foul, but Castle could never find the light between the trees to score in the paint.
The Spurs’ ability to find on-the-fly solutions wasn’t up to par with the Thunder.
“I think that it’s one thing to say we need to be smarter about how we’re using physicality. It’s another thing to say it’s not at the level that we want it to be,” Barnes said. “And obviously, coming from Portland, coming from Minnesota, two series where that was, I think, at the forefront of things. There should be no reason that that’s also not the forefront of the series as well.”
Now it’s on Wembanyama to evolve. To find that beast mode that makes him unstoppable. It’s a combination of the precision Gilgeous-Alexander showed to keep driving, reading, shooting (and falling) until the results piled up. But it’s also finding that fury from within to dig deeper and win the battles for position and play with aggression that cannot be stopped.
“I think that yes, there is a level of desperation that comes out. Yes, there is a level of focus and execution that comes out, but there’s also just, I think, a level of competitiveness and physicality that you have to have in order to do those things,” Barnes said. “Those are kind of the precursors to everything else that comes about it.”
So who are the Spurs? Are they the precocious early arrivers who had a cute season we’ll always remember fondly? Or are they champions who are here to change the league and chase a dynasty?
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Teams like this usually have to fall short first and learn from that painful moment. Players such as Wemby often need that initial failure, embarrassment and disappointment to find the force within them. Can they be special? We’re about to find out.
“It’s my first playoffs. It’s the first playoffs for many of us,” Wembanyama said. “Of course, there was going to be hard trials. It’s to be expected.
“But now we’re going to see what we’re made of.”
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