The future remains bright in San Antonio, but that didn’t make Saturday night’s loss any easier to accept, especially for Victor Wembanyama.
After a stunning run to the NBA Finals, the Spurs saw their season come to an end with a 94-90 loss to the New York Knicks in Game 5, handing New York the championship and leaving San Antonio to wonder what could have been.
For head coach Mitch Johnson, the reality was simple.
“It’s over,” Johnson said. “So there will be plenty of time for reflection. … We weren’t ready to win an NBA championship. The better team won. We did a lot of good things, and we didn’t finish the job. That’s what it is.”
The defeat capped a frustrating series for the Spurs, who repeatedly let large leads slip away. San Antonio surrendered advantages of 14, 12, 29 and 16 points across four different games, exposing the growing pains of one of the league’s youngest contenders.
“Yeah, there’s a lot that goes into it,” Johnson said. “The simple consistencies, we didn’t deserve to win the games. There’s a lot of level of execution. There can be rebounding. There can be end-of-game details. There can be starting the game where you get the lead and then you don’t sustain that.”
At the center of it all was Victor Wembanyama, whose first Finals appearance delivered both invaluable experience and painful lessons.
“I think that compared to anything before, this is the biggest lesson of my life,” Wembanyama said. “The biggest learning moment. 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 before. … What I’m pissed about is that there’s probably a hundred games before we can be back in Finals. I don’t know how to say it in English, but I’m going to have to hold that inside of me and slow down and wait and execute for a hundred games.”
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