NBA Finals loss to Knicks shows how much work Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama still has to do
· Yahoo Sports
At age 23, Shaquille O’Neal was swept in his first trip to the NBA Finals. So was LeBron James at 22.
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Those reality checks are regularly referenced as formative stepping stones for all-time greats who went on to win four championships apiece.
It’s something Victor Wembanyama, 22, can take at least some solace in after his first trip to the Finals ended in a sobering five-game defeat by the Knicks.
“It’s painful. But I’m not running away from that. I’m using that to fuel me,” Wembanyama said after his San Antonio Spurs fell at home, 94-90, in Game 5 on Saturday night.
“I’m not satisfied with not winning. But as I said, this is the biggest lesson of my life. As a team, there’s no better experience than what we just lived.”
Many anointed the French-born Wembanyama as the next face of the NBA, and for good reason. At 7-4 with an 8-foot wingspan, the sharp-shooting, shot-blocking Wembanyama is already doing things we’ve never seen on a basketball court.
In his just-completed third NBA season, Wembanyama was the league’s first-ever unanimous Defensive Player of the Year, and he finished third in MVP voting. His wise-beyond-his-years insight at press conferences and dogged pursuit of discipline — he trained last offseason with Shaolin Monks in China — only add to his appeal.
But these NBA Finals offered a stark reminder that Wembanyama is far from a finished product.
His late-game miscues proved costly in the series.
The most extreme example came in the waning seconds of Game 2, when Wembanyama passed the ball when teammate Stephon Castle wasn’t looking. The ball bounded off of Castle’s back and into the hands of Jalen Brunson, whom Wembanyama then inadvertently fouled.
That set up Brunson’s game-winning free throw, while Wembanyama’s missed jumper at the other end secured the Knicks’ 105-104 win.
In Game 4, as the Knicks furiously erased a 29-point deficit, Wembanyama missed 10 of his final 12 shots, as well as a pair of free throws with 1:47 remaining while the Spurs clung to a one-point lead.
After that 107-106 defeat, Wembanyama — who averaged 29.2 minutes per game in the regular season — acknowledged fatigue was an issue. He played 44 minutes that night.
Energy seemed to be an issue down the stretch of other games, too, as Wembanyama averaged 39.8 minutes per game in the series. He shot 3-of-14 over the fourth quarters in the final two games.
“I learned, one of many things, that the margin of error is very, very thin,” Wembanyama said. “Our domination stints are absolute. We absolutely dominated for most of the series. But our errors, our mistakes, are punished so hard that we can’t have ups and downs like this. The ups are OK. The downs are the reason we lost.”
Wembanyama’s emotional composure also requires refinement following his first-ever playoff run.
Facing unrelenting physicality in the Western Conference semifinals, Wembanyama earned a flagrant 2 foul and an automatic ejection for elbowing Minnesota’s Naz Reid in the neck.
After a rough Game 5 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, Wembanyama skipped out on his postgame media obligations, prompting a warning from the NBA.
And in the Finals, Wembanyama got away with a Game 3 shove of Brunson, as well as another non-call in Game 5 when he stuck his foot out and didn’t give Brunson space to land after a 3-pointer.
In between, Wembanyama was called for a flagrant 1 foul in Game 4 when he caught Karl-Anthony Towns in the chin with an elbow. That gave him three “flagrant points” in the playoffs. Had he picked up a fourth, Wembanyama would have been subject to a one-game suspension, which made his Game 5 contact with Brunson all the more confounding.
Early in the Finals, Wembanyama acknowledged the difficulty of coming down from the high of defeating the Thunder in Game 7 of the previous round. He described feeling “blurry” during his Game 2 meltdown.
These are moments and experiences that should harden Wembanyama for future playoff runs — the types of highs and lows Brunson and other Knicks veterans endured before they finally broke through this year.
“I think he’s stepped into every moment with the appropriate amount of fearlessness and also respect for the moment and being exactly who he is,” Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson said of Wembanyama after the Game 5 loss.
“He’s bringing his teammates and everybody else along with him. It’s been pretty fun to observe and be a part of.”
Wembanyama averaged 26.0 points, 11.2 rebounds and 3.6 blocks per game in the Finals, but he shot 42.3% from the field, often settling for outside jumpers despite his towering size advantage.
The comparison to James in his 2007 Finals debut is an apt one, but that Cleveland Cavaliers roster around him had nothing close to the talent level of Wembanyama’s burgeoning supporting cast.
Perhaps the more applicable experience from James’ career is the 2011 Finals, when his new-look Miami Heat lost in six games to a battle-tested Dallas Mavericks roster that played with similar cohesion to what the Knicks just demonstrated.
James was a dominant but flawed player at that point, and he used that loss as a wake-up call to improve his post-up game. He went on to win the next two NBA championships and four of the next nine.
Wembanyama, meanwhile, is an elite defender, particularly when he can roam the baseline and protect the paint and corners in the “rover” role he mostly stuck to in Games 3 through 5.
But Wembanyama remains a work-in-progress on offense, where he’s dominant as a lob threat and solid as a shooter but lacks a post-up game and is limited when he makes more than one dribble.
It’s possible — likely, even — that Wembanyama’s championship window is just now opening, and that his youthful Spurs were ahead of schedule.
But make no mistake: Wembanyama still has work to do.
“Compared to anything before, this is the biggest lesson of my life, the biggest learning moment,” Wembanyama said. “I can’t tell you exactly what the lesson is, but we’re learning from that, for sure. I’m learning more than any other time in my life.”