How the Spurs will deal with NBA Finals ghosts that still haunt them
· Yahoo Sports
The "haunting," as Victor Wembanyama called it, started more than three months ago. The ghosts won't just pack up and leave tomorrow.
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Solace will come a little easier, eventually. The worst nights, when Wembanyama said he struggled to sleep among the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens that lingered after the NBA Finals, probably are behind him.
But the rimmed-out shots and the too-quick passes that kept the Spurs' superstar center tossing and turning? The calls that coach Mitch Johnson torments himself for not making? The play that De'Aaron Fox wishes he could have back?
For better or worse, those memories live here now. So does the pain that came with them. And even though the Spurs are intent not to dwell in regret about the way a mostly joyful breakthrough season ended, this summer they learned that there's no sense in denying the existence of that regret, either.
"There is just a point where you accept that you have to go through it, and you have to feel all of it," Wembanyama said Monday as the team reconvened for the start of training camp. "And we don't want to hide from anything."
When you took a moment to let it sink in, it was remarkable to contemplate how much of Monday's discussions inside the practice facility at The Rock were about what the Spurs did not accomplish last year. This was, after all, a team that showed up to the previous preseason media day riding a six-year playoff drought.
Twelve months ago, almost to the day, Wembanyama predicted that making the postseason as the sixth seed or better in the Western Conference would constitute a success. And somehow, on Monday, he and his teammates had to go on and on about the misery of coming up three victories short of an NBA championship.
The problem is, ghosts don't listen to rational explanations. They aren't impressed with a franchise arriving ahead of schedule. If those sleepless nights were "haunting," as Wembanyama described them, it was because everyone understood that some players wait an entire career for an opportunity like the one the Spurs gave themselves last June.
Not only did one of the youngest teams in the league make it to the NBA Finals, they led all five games by at least 10 points. They lost four of them.
"It's reality, and it's something that you have to live with," guard Stephon Castle said. "I don't think I'm going to ever erase it out of my mind."
The good news is that nobody is asking him to. At any given media day, in any given NBA city, there is no shortage of empty platitudes, but to the Spurs' credit, there was zero talk Monday about wiping a slate clean.
A clean slate is what Johnson had almost two years ago, when a stroke suffered by Gregg Popovich thrust him into the job of an NBA head coach just hours before an early-November tipoff.
In the whirlwind that followed, Johnson joked, there have been times when he kind of "blacked out in terms of riding the never-ending, unforgiving current of this league."
"The amount of overthinking, ‘what if?,' second-guessing insecurities happen quite often," Johnson said. "And they led us all the way to June 13, and since."
June 13 was the day the New York Knicks raised a championship trophy on the floor at Frost Bank Center. Johnson didn't say anything Monday about forcing himself to forget that.
Left, a reporter films San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama as he poses for photos and video clips during the NBA basketball team's media day at the Victory Capital Performance Center in San Antonio, Monday, Sept. 28, 2026. Right, San Antonio Spurs' De'aaron Fox (4) and Victor Wembanyama (1) pose for photos together. (Sam Owens (2)/San Antonio Express-News)Of course that memory will stick with him. Of course he'll never stop wondering if a quicker timeout or a different substitution could have made a difference. Even after the Spurs won their fifth championship in 2014, Popovich admitted more than once that he never really got over the way they lost in Miami the year before.
Chances are, last June's heartbreak will eat at Fox for a long time, too. He didn't play well against the Knicks, and his decision to attempt a late layup instead of dribbling out the clock in Game 4 helped New York complete a comeback for the ages.
This summer, the criticism has been merciless. Few want to hear that Fox was playing through an injury that would have sidelined him in the regular season. And even fewer want to hear that Fox was a huge reason why the Spurs made it to the Finals in the first place.
Everybody wants to talk about the end. Fox doesn't shy away from that. But he said he has something working in his favor.
"I feel like I have a gift in being able to move on," Fox said.
That gift can come in handy even when the haunting isn't quite over. As Castle pointed out, just because the disappointment of the Finals will stick with him forever doesn't mean he has to yield to it.
"Just letting it sit on me?" Castle said. "That doesn't happen anymore."
In other words, the Spurs might have to live with ghosts for a while.
But there's nothing stopping them from winning with them, too.
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