Eventually, the Spurs will need to mean it. They’ll need to mean what Gregg Popovich said a year ago. They’ll need to mean what Victor Wembanyama said this week
Eventually, the Spurs will need to mean it. They’ll need to mean what Gregg Popovich said a year ago. They’ll need to mean what Victor Wembanyama said this week. And they’ll need to mean it relatively soon, because here’s a guarantee: Next fall, if the Spurs show up for another preseason offering the same line, nobody is going to believe them a third time.
The truth is, everyone probably got a little ahead of themselves when setting expectations for the Spurs’ first season with Wembanyama. Popovich probably got a little ahead of himself while being uncharacteristically specific about the results he wanted. The rest of us probably got a little ahead of ourselves when jumping to conclusions about what Popovich’s declaration meant. As it turns out, even the most grizzled old NBA coaches can get swept up in hype and positivity every now and then, and that might have been part of what happened when the Spurs won the Wembanyama lottery. Coming off a season in which his team lost 60 games, here is what Popovich said at the Spurs’ preseason media day on Oct. 2, 2023: “Winning is as important this year as learning was in the past. We’ve got to continue to learn, but adding more wins is appropriate and mandatory.” And coming off a season in which his team lost 60 games, here is what Wembanyama said at the Spurs’ next preseason media day, on Sept. 30, 2024: “Last year, our expectation for ourselves was to learn, and to learn to know ourselves. … This year, we expect us to win.” Out of Wembanyama’s mouth, that sentiment makes a lot of sense, just as it did a year ago out of Popovich’s. The difference is that this time, a closer look at the circumstances makes the expectation seem much more realistic. To be fair, Popovich got part of his preseason prediction correct last year. During Wembanyama’s rookie season, the goal of winning indeed was more important than it had been the season before, when every loss increased the Spurs’ chances of landing a franchise-altering 7-foot-3 French sensation. Say what you will about the many ways the Spurs struggled in 2023-24, but they weren’t tanking, on either a front-office level or a night-to-night basis. They tried to win every game. They gave themselves more chances to do so than they’d done the year before. And it often crushed them when they came up short. Anyone who watched them throughout last season recognized that progress was being made. But the part of Popovich’s preseason quote that wound up looking like a mistake in retrospect was the second half of the second sentence, when he said “adding more wins is appropriate and necessary.” For a variety of reasons — some frustrating, and some perfectly understandable — the Spurs weren’t able to do that and were in danger of finishing with the worst record in franchise history until they won their final two games of the season. As it turned out, expecting them to win more last year was expecting too much from a team that began the season with an ill-fated point-guard experiment, and that had the youngest roster in the league, and that lacked almost any kind of late-game know-how. Whether or not Popovich announced it that from the beginning, last season was still mostly about learning. And despite what Wembanyama said this week, the Spurs’ learning days surely aren’t over yet. Over the next six months, there will be plenty more hard truths to absorb. But Wembanyama isn’t a wide-eyed beginner anymore. He now has Chris Paul, one of the most accomplished point guards in the history of the sport, directing the offense. Those two facts alone should be enough to change the outcome of, what, a quarter of the 25-30 close games that the Spurs let slip away in the closing minutes last year? Maybe a third of them? Throw in the additions of Harrison Barnes and Stephon Castle, and the anticipated steps forward from Jeremy Sochan and Devin Vassell, and Wembanyama’s 2024 preseason prediction looks a lot safer than Popovich’s 2023 one did. The caveat there, of course, is that it might not come true right away. If there’s been a theme to the ebbs and flows of a typical Spurs season under Popovich for the past 28 years, it’s that they generally look a lot better in March and April than they do in October and November. That’s been true of his veteran teams. It’s been true of his young ones, too. Saturday, when asked if it was fair to expect another “slow build” toward the finish this season, he had only one nit to pick. “I don’t know if I’d use the word slow as an adjective,” Popovich said Saturday, “but it’s step-by-step.” If the steps proceed as he expects them to? He’ll be able to talk about winning again. And mean it.
Victor Wembanyama NBA Gregg Popovich Devin Vassell Jeremy Sochan Stephon Castle Harrison Barnes Chris Paul French
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