The San Antonio Spurs arrive in the NBA Finals as the youngest and least experienced team left standing -- and on ESPN's NBA Today, broadcasting from a sweltering San Antonio, the panel spent the eve of Game 1 arguing over whether that should worry them at all. Mostly, it spent it marveling at Victor Wembanyama.
Kendrick Perkins set the tone with a circus barker's introduction. "Welcome to the greatest show on earth," he said. "And I'm not talking about an elephant standing on one leg or a tiger jumping through hoops. I'm talking about Victor Wembanyama. He is the greatest show on earth. He is the future face of the NBA." Perkins, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year's biggest on-air champion, warned that Wembanyama's defense is about to face its sternest test yet against "one of the greatest offensive teams we've seen in playoff history."
Perkins also insisted this is not the buttoned-up San Antonio of old. "This is not the old version of the San Antonio Spurs. The culture has changed," he said. "These guys, they're loud about it. They let you know -- if you don't have Spurs across your chest, we're not fooling with you. And it starts with the head of the snake. I'm not talking about Wemby. I'm talking about that guy on the sideline, because when he gets red, I call him an evil genius." Gregg Popovich, he argued, is setting an aggressive tone his young roster is following.
Danny Green, a champion in San Antonio himself, reached for the franchise's defining comparison while stopping short of the full anointment. "He's very similar to the one great Tim Duncan," Green said. "Off the court he's a different brand, more outspoken. But on the court, that obsession, that drive, that want to be great -- they're very similar. He's a modern version of Tim Duncan. He has that mental fortitude to raise his teammates up and empower them to win a championship."
Brian Windhorst pushed back on the idea that San Antonio's youth is a fatal flaw. "When I watch the Spurs finish off that game in Oklahoma City in the fourth quarter, with guys who'd never been in a Game 7 before hitting shots under pressure -- I'm done with it," he said. "I don't care about experience anymore. This team can do anything." Windhorst added that Wembanyama himself is no stranger to high-stakes heartbreak, pointing to painful international defeats with France: "The 2024 Olympics, playing at home in Paris -- that affected him on a visceral level. When he talks about playing with emotion, he has a deep well to draw on."
Wembanyama, for his part, struck a deliberately unsatisfied note at Media Day. "I saw Pop right away when we landed, and the emotion was really something I haven't felt in a while," he said. "But we still need to come back down to earth and realize we haven't done the hardest yet. The job isn't done at all." Of the Knicks, he was respectful: "They're a great team of experienced guys who are not here by chance, but by relentless effort over the years. They're right where they're supposed to be."
That refusal to celebrate prematurely was a theme. Perkins, who lost the 2012 Finals with a young Oklahoma City team, offered a pointed warning. "A lot of teams are happy when they make it to the Finals for the first time," he said. "The happy teams get their butts sent home." Rookie guard Dylan Harper seemed to have absorbed the message. "Never in a thousand years would you have told me my first year in the NBA I'd be playing at Madison Square Garden in the Finals -- I'd think you're crazy," Harper said. "We've been making history with every game. But we've still got four more to go. We really haven't done anything yet."
The one cloud over San Antonio, Windhorst noted, is rest. The Spurs needed seven games to reach the Finals while New York swept Cleveland. "In playoff history, when a team that swept plays a team that went seven games, the team that swept is 20 and four," he said. "History tells us that rest difference will make a difference. It's just a matter of when."
