Spurs news: Stephon Castle gets real about San Antonio's championship aspirations ahead of 2026 season

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Stephon Castle is not pretending this season looks like the last one. Speaking at Spurs media day on Monday, the guard was asked whether he had thought about what it means to enter a year as the team everyone is aiming at, and he did not dodge it.

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“Yeah, it definitely has,” Castle said in a press conference. “It’s going to be a lot harder to even get back into the position that we were in last year.”

San Antonio reached the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014, finishing 62-20 in the regular season before beating the defending champion Thunder in seven games in the Western Conference Finals. The run ended in painful fashion against the Knicks, with the Spurs building double-digit leads in every game of the series and losing four of them, including a Game 4 collapse in which New York erased the largest deficit in Finals history.

Castle believes the group is better equipped this time. “Coming into this year, I think everybody on our team has gotten better. We brought all the troops back,” he said. “We have a lot of clarity on why we feel like we lost and what we can do to get better.”

The continuity is real. Victor Wembanyama, De’Aaron Fox, Dylan Harper, Julian Champagnie and Harrison Barnes all return, with Tobias Harris added to the group. Wembanyama is coming off a season in which he averaged 25 points and 11.5 rebounds, was named Defensive Player of the Year unanimously, and took Western Conference Finals MVP honors.

What changes is the attention. Castle sounded unbothered by it. “Obviously, it’s going to be a different look with being the targeted and the hunted, but I don’t think it’s anything that we’re not ready for,” he said.

He has some basis for the confidence. Castle won a national title at UConn before entering the league, then took Rookie of the Year in 2025, and he delivered 23 points in the Spurs’ lone Finals win in Game 3 at Madison Square Garden.

San Antonio will get an early reminder of unfinished business. The Spurs visit the Knicks on Christmas Day in a Finals rematch.

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