There’s been a disturbing feeling of inevitability creeping through the NBA lately. That’s what a 24-1 team can do to the field. The Thunder are competing for every record in the book. The notion of a 74-8 record? Entirely plausible. A 33-game winning streak? They were basically halfway there entering Saturday. The net rating mark? They’re blowing by it. We’ve reached the point at which teams are starting to act as though a Giannis Antetokounmpo trade could be pointless because of how incredible the Thunder are. Oklahoma City has been so good this season that if you counted their single-digit victories as losses, they still would have entered Saturday’s NBA Cup semifinal with the NBA’s eighth-best record (17-8).
The first quarter between the Thunder and Spurs followed that script. The Thunder led by 11 after 12 minutes. And then Victor Wembanyama stepped on the floor, and the NBA felt competitive again.
Wembanyama had faced the Thunder before, of course. Four times in his first two seasons. One victory and three lopsided defeats. But those were, in effect, practice runs. Wembanyama’s Spurs were still building. But this one was real. The Spurs entered Saturday’s clash as a No. 4 seed in the West. The game was played on a neutral floor under the bright Vegas lights for the NBA Cup.
It started out small. Wembanyama, returning from a calf injury, played just seven first-half minutes. The Spurs won them by 20 points. That was really all that kept them in the game early, as they adjusted to Oklahoma City’s overwhelming speed and pressure. The guards steadied the ship. The jumpers started to fall. Wembanyama rose to the moment. How many players have you ever seen block a Chet Holmgren jumper? His fallaway shot over Alex Caruso was MVP stuff. The Thunder threw punch after punch. The Spurs kept picking themselves off of the mat. Final score: Spurs 111, Thunder 109.
The win felt like an arrival of sorts. Not for Wembanyama, obviously. He’s long-since made his impending dominance clear. Not for the Spurs either. If anything, they did that over the previous few weeks, when they went 9-3 without Wembanyama as he recovered from a calf strain. This felt bigger, like it wasn’t just contained to a single player or team. It felt like the Thunder met their eventual match. It felt like the first real taste of the rivalry to come, the first of what should be many, many times we see these teams play with actual stakes.
The NBA is rarely that simple. We never got to see LeBron James and Kobe Bryant meet in the Finals, after all, despite one of the two of them getting there 12 years in a row. Rivalries rarely get to be preordained. But San Antonio and Oklahoma City have been building toward this for quite some time. Thunder GM Sam Presti got his start in San Antonio, after all, and the two of them have been far ahead of the apron curve at every turn. Both tanked briefly, obviously, but they also stacked draft picks and swaps as a defense against future CBA-related cost cuts. They’ve selectively added the right veterans and taken advantage of less astute organizations for opportunistic upgrades. It helps that there are some natural tension points as well. What is Holmgren if not Wembanyama-lite?
There does some to be a bit of bad blood between the two, bad blood that’s been missing from the NBA’s more recent set of rivalries. When Wembanyama was asked about guarding Holmgren before the game, he said that “anybody is hard to guard when you have to help on the MVP.” The circumstances aren’t quite identical, but it’s hard not to think of LeBron James silently grumbling as he had to stare down Golden State’s super teams and wonder how much easier he could have had it with such support. Wembanyama’s team is far better even now, at probably the youngest and weakest it will be in this era, but it’s a pretty classic rivalry archetype: best player vs. best team. Wembanyama isn’t quite there yet. Few doubt he soon will be.
It could go in any number of directions from here. Maybe this is Bulls-Pistons, one historically dominant defense owning the league for a period before eventually ceding the crown to their generation’s true, defining player. Maybe it’s Lakers-Celtics of the 1980s, two evenly matched juggernauts constantly one-upping one another and matching up in the playoffs almost every year. Or maybe it’s Warriors-Cavaliers, with the dominant overall team prevailing over the singular historic talent more often than not. Maybe, probably, basically definitely, it’s something new entirely, with shades of every significant rivalry that took the league to this point.
Denver and Houston will be heard from in May and June. The Knicks could well win the NBA Cup on Tuesday night, and they’d like to believe they’ll be in the mix when spring rolls around as well. As much as it felt this way, nothing is ever inevitable in this sport. But for the past few weeks, we felt as though one team might be overwhelming the entire league in a way we’d never really seen before. There’s a world in which the Thunder both break the wins record and make three lottery picks, including No. 1 overall, next offseason. This combination of present dominance and future security was almost demoralizing, as if the league had no answer for what was about to come.
So Saturday was a nice reminder that at least one is out there. The Thunder may become a dynasty. The Spurs are a few years behind but share very similar means and ambitions. If they stay healthy and avoid unexpected catastrophe, they’re going to be playing games like the one we just watched on Saturday for a long, long time. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait too long for round two. The rematch comes in nine days, in San Antonio on Dec. 23. They relocate to Oklahoma City on Christmas for their third game in less than two weeks. Saturday was the start of something. There’s a whole lot more to come.