There is only one team in the last eight years that has won a road Game 7 in the Western Conference Finals.
They wore blue and gold and they walked into a building where the reigning MVP was waiting with a full home crowd and nothing left to lose, and they beat him anyway. Along the way, Houston missed 27 consecutive three-pointers, which remains one of the more traumatic public events in modern Texas history. The Warriors had already decided internally what the outcome was going to be, and they spent 48 minutes informing Houston of that decision.
Tonight the San Antonio Spurs get their chance to do the same thing. To do it, they’ll have to walk into Oklahoma City and beat the back-to-back MVP in his own building. If they accomplish that, they’ll become the first team since that Warriors dynasty to win a road Game 7 in the Western Conference Finals.The last team that did it had Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry.The Spurs have something the basketball world is still struggling to properly classify.
Most rebuilding timelines do not accidentally produce a seven-foot-five basketball cryptid in the process.
Most young teams arrive by knocking politely. Wembanyama appears to have brought a battering ram and a complete indifference to anyone’s timeline for his arrival. He is 22 years old playing in his first Western Conference Finals, and he has spent this series behaving as though none of those facts are particularly relevant to what he is about to do to you.
In Game 6, facing elimination on the road, he posted 28 points, 10 rebounds, 3 blocks, and 2 steals, becoming the first player in Spurs franchise history to record 25-plus points, 10-plus rebounds, 2-plus steals, and 2-plus blocks in an elimination game. That is a young player informing the moment that he will be running things from here.
The formula in this series has been consistent enough to build a thesis around: when Wembanyama has outscored SGA, the Spurs have won. When he hasn’t, they’ve lost. Tonight is where the pattern either holds or breaks, and it is happening in the loudest building Wembanyama has played in all postseason.
The Warriors in 2018 had four All-Stars, two championships, and the institutional confidence of a team that had been to this exact place so many times that the road felt like a commute. They knew exactly what they were capable of because they had already done it repeatedly. The Spurs don’t have all that veteran savvy. The head coach has never coached a team before this season. The oldest player getting key minutes turns 34 today.
Wembanyama is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. Dylan Harper is 20. None of them have accumulated enough NBA scar tissue to understand how scared a team on the road in a Game 7 is supposed to be. That is not a disadvantage. That is what it looks like when a group of players has not yet been taught the limits of what they are allowed to accomplish.
The Warriors knew they could win that Game 7 in Houston because they had won in harder situations before. The Spurs do not know they shouldn’t win this Game 7 in Oklahoma City because nobody has shown them evidence that they can’t. Through six games of this series, every time someone handed them a reason to doubt themselves, they handed it back.
That is a specific and particular kind of dangerous that does not show up in any efficiency metric ever calculated. The Warriors showed what it looks like when a team walks into a hostile Game 7 and leaves with the conference. The Spurs have one game to show they learned something from watching. That should concern Oklahoma City.
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