The San Antonio Spurs want to be the first seed in the Western Conference this season, Victor Wembanyama said, a goal he kept deliberately vague until now. The Spurs are approaching a season that carries heavy expectations after a 4-1 series loss to the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals.
On a muggy Sunday in September at Frost Bank Center, with San Antonio Spurs media day still more than two weeks away, the fan group chosen by Wembanyama, the Jackals, prepared for its own tryouts. Membership is not guaranteed this season. Only fans who earn the designation of “pack leader” keep their place, so returning members face their own pressure.
“This is something that hasn’t been done to this level,” said Aidan Sterling, president of the Jackals. “All the people who weren’t Jackals last year, all the new guys, I know there’s nerves amongst them.”
The Spurs face similar uncertainty. Their 2025-26 season brought a 28-win improvement, a first Finals appearance in 12 seasons and an end to a six-year postseason drought. Yet no team has advanced to the Finals in consecutive seasons since the 2018-19 Golden State Warriors, and the Western Conference remains a gauntlet. The East has also improved considerably.
Keeping goals in-house
Wembanyama, who is 22, drew attention before last season when he set the team’s goal of reaching the postseason as a top-six seed. At media day this year, he was the only Spur to speak openly about specific expectations.
“I couldn’t imagine better motivation,” Wembanyama said of the Finals defeat. “We have some goals between us that we’re going to keep between us as teammates. We won the West last year. We don’t want to do anything less this year. We want to be the first seed, and then we want to keep fighting for this top spot.”
San Antonio plans to rely on process, as it has for decades. The approach focuses on internal improvement and day-to-day work, helping the team manage an 82-game regular season and a potentially long postseason. That methodology dates to the 29-season tenure of former coach Gregg Popovich, whose teams won five titles and set a record-tying run of 22 consecutive playoff appearances.
At Popovich’s final media day as head coach, during Wembanyama’s second season, the Hall of Famer said, “even when we were a championship-caliber team, we never said we’re going to win this many games. It was never a point of discussion.” The Spurs have kept that approach under a new regime.
“Our expectation is to continue to try to improve and be the best version of this team we can be,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “The expectations are kind of like big games, right? There’s added enthusiasm, excitement, criticism, opinion. I’ve been on both sides of it now in this league, and I’ll take the expectations.”
Searching for answers after the Finals
When the Knicks celebrated their first championship in 53 years on the Frost Bank Center floor, Wembanyama stood a few feet away at a lectern, puzzled by how San Antonio lost a series in which the Spurs led by double digits in every game.
“[All] five games this series had the same scenario,” Wembanyama said. “[It was surprising] how relentless we were in our mistakes, and [how] they were in punishing them.”
The Spurs spent the days after the loss investigating what went wrong. Few details have emerged. “We have a lot of clarity on why we feel like we lost and what we can do to get better,” said Spurs guard Stephon Castle, who is one-third of the expected starting backcourt.
The Spurs’ backcourt experiment is central to that work. Castle, De’Aaron Fox and rising second-year guard Dylan Harper, who impressed against the Knicks as a sixth man, shared the floor for just 69 minutes last season, including 25 minutes in the Finals. Those minutes produced a 47-point scoring deficit. By comparison, the Spurs posted a plus-9.4 net rating when Fox and Castle played together in the regular season, plus-6.2 with Fox and Harper, and plus-11.0 with Harper and Castle. The organisation believes the three-guard combination can work, since Castle and Harper have the size to hold their own against wings, and all three can drive into the paint at will.
“We’re very fortunate to have such a dynamic roster where you can really get creative in terms of puzzle pieces and how you want to build out the puzzle,” Johnson said. “We saw it at times with the three guards in addition to what you can do around Victor. … There’s definite growth for those three guys just in terms of playing off each other and continuing to complement each other.”
New lead assistant Billy Donovan, who replaced Sean Sweeney when he took the head coaching job in Orlando, will help develop the three guards’ chemistry on the floor. Donovan was already working with Fox, Castle and Harper together during the brief portions of practice open to the media.
“It’s been great,” Fox said. “One thing we’ve talked about is him being able to coach three guards at the same time. When he was [head coach] in OKC, he had Dennis [Schroder], Shai [Gilgeous-Alexander] and [Chris Paul]. So, he’s been able to make it work. That team wasn’t supposed to go to the playoffs at the time and then ended up playing well because they figured it out. That’s one thing he’s bringing to us.”
A summer built on togetherness
Wembanyama got straight back to work after the Finals, making the most of the shortest offseason of his young career. He worked again with Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon, a second consecutive summer together. He and several Spurs, including free-agent addition Tobias Harris, also visited Fox for workouts at his home gym outside Houston.
“We had a long season, but you don’t want to go the entire summer without being able to be around your teammates and getting in the gym together,” Fox said. “Just being able to be around each other, I think, is big. We have a group of guys that like being around each other.”
In August, Wembanyama invited several teammates to Paris for training, sightseeing and fellowship. He wanted them to see where he started. The team worked out at Palais des Sports Maurice Thorez, where Wembanyama’s professional career began as a gangly teenager with Nanterre 92. Wembanyama described the visit as touching, even emotional.
“They were willing to make this trip, and they were also curious about what I wanted to show them,” Wembanyama said. “So it matters because these people matter to me. This place matters to me. Having the two of them together is kind of the same as when family comes to visit here.”
Second-year forward Carter Bryant, who sat with Wembanyama on plane rides as a rookie, said they had discussed “our personal goals, team goals, collective goals [and] off-the-court goals.” In Paris, Bryant said he came away impressed by how far Wembanyama has come and by how he has stayed humble, which has helped him grow as a leader.
“[It was big] for us to take the time out of our summers after we had been together longer than anybody, then come to his home and for him to educate us about where he’s from, [to] just be around him in his element,” Bryant said. “For him to get to that point and come back to where he started and then have the people around him that are like, ‘Yo, next year we’re going to take that next step.’ Not too many people get that experience.”
The group shared meals together on several occasions, including a dinner on a riverboat on the Seine with the Eiffel Tower as the backdrop. Bryant and his girlfriend biked 32 miles one day, and veteran forward Harrison Barnes arranged a tour of the Louvre for the visiting Spurs. Wembanyama stayed in training, taking Barnes to work with a French rugby club, where the 7-foot-4 centre said he focused on his balance.
Wembanyama became the NBA’s youngest and first unanimous Defensive Player of the Year last season, finished third in MVP voting and led San Antonio back to the Finals. Bryant said Wembanyama’s insistence on including his teammates in his offseason work stood out to him.
“With a franchise like this, the biggest thing is family having each other’s backs and understanding what we stand for as a unit,” Bryant said.
The road back to the Finals
San Antonio understands the challenge. Even if the Spurs play at their peak, factors beyond their control could derail the season. Injuries and the Spurs themselves ended the Oklahoma City Thunder’s bid to return to the Finals last season. The Indiana Pacers’ hopes ended before the next season began, when Tyrese Haliburton tore his right Achilles tendon in Game 7 against OKC. Injuries also stopped the 2024-25 Boston Celtics, while the 2024-25 Dallas Mavericks gave up their prospects by trading their best player, Luka Doncic.
The last team to win the title after losing in the Finals the previous year was the Warriors, who used a once-in-a-generation cap spike to sign Kevin Durant. The Spurs’ only notable free-agent signing is Harris, a 15-year veteran who has never advanced beyond the second round of the playoffs.
The Spurs know they cannot leap straight back to the Finals to erase the mistakes that cost them the series against the Knicks. Across the organisation, everyone has bought into taking things one step at a time, the same approach they used last season.
“It’s human nature, right,” Spurs forward Devin Vassell said. “You want to be back in that situation, but you can’t skip a day. You can’t skip training camp. You can’t skip the preseason. You can’t skip opening night. You can’t skip the lone back-to-backs. You can’t sit here and snap your fingers [and] you’re back in the Finals. It just doesn’t work like that. Nothing is guaranteed. So, we’ve got to keep implementing what we were doing last year, stuff that carried over and just building good habits. We can’t fast forward anything. So, just take it day by day.”
Veterans Barnes and Luke Kornet have both reached the Finals before. Golden State won the title in Barnes’ first Finals appearance in 2015 but lost the following season 4-3 to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Kornet played for the Celtics in the 2022 Finals, which the Warriors won in six games, and returned in 2024, when Boston beat the Mavericks in five games to end a sixteen-year title drought.
“For us, it’s a matter of focus that we have every single day in terms of what’s our standard we’re setting for ourselves and comparing it against that,” Barnes said. “I don’t think it’s one of those things where you simply carry momentum from one season to the next. You have to come back and start the journey from day one again.
“I do think there’s something that sharpens your focus, like shared heartbreak. And mind you, health is always a major factor. Those things are out of your control. But for the things that are in your control, having that experience helps you frame how you approach every single day.”
Early fixtures
The Spurs’ season opens against a stacked early schedule. Friday, 16 October: Nuggets at Lakers, 10.30 p.m. ET. Wednesday, 21 October: Timberwolves at Heat, 7.30 p.m. ET, and Warriors at Lakers, 10 p.m. ET. Thursday, 22 October: Cavaliers at 76ers, 7 p.m. ET, and Nuggets at Thunder, 9.30 p.m. ET.
Several fans at the Jackals’ tryouts showed their dedication to Sterling, one in a Chewbacca costume beneath a David Robinson jersey, and others in green alien garb. Wembanyama and his teammates, meanwhile, continue to temper expectations for the season.
“This isn’t pressure,” Sterling said. “This is passion.”