Victor Wembanyama's time is coming -- it just wasn...

THE LASTING IMAGE of Victor Wembanyama's first NBA Finals came in the first quarter of Game 4, when the San Antonio Spurs star smiled and pointed at his temple after goading New York Knicks center Mitchell Robinson into a flagrant foul. Wembanyama looked delighted that he had gotten into Robinson's head. By night's end, his glee was revealed to be hubris: San Antonio blew a 29-point lead to lose Game 4, the pivotal contest of the series. Unable to recover from the excruciating defeat, the Spurs suffered another fourth-quarter collapse Saturday in a season-ending 94-90 Game 5 loss to the Knicks. During a mesmerizing postseason debut in which he posted historic numbers and led the Spurs to their first Finals appearance since 2014, the 22-year-old Wembanyama proved he could carry a team, handle playoff physicality and manage the many challenges posed by his immense fame. Yet San Antonio left the Frost Bank Center as runners-up, an oh-so-close agony Wembanyama previously experienced when his French national team lost to the United States in the gold medal game at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In an exceptionally tight Finals in which all five games were within five points in the final minute, Wembanyama played below his standard down the stretch of San Antonio's losses and made several mental mistakes by rushing and miscalculating at crucial moments. As he enters a championship window that could span a decade or longer, Wembanyama must only look back at the tape of his exchange with Robinson to find the most important ingredient to his first title. The answer is right there at the end of his slender index finger: his mind. "This is the biggest lesson of my life," Wembanyama said. "What I'm pissed about is that there's probably 100 games before we can get back to the Finals. I'm going to have to hold that inside of me and slow down and wait." THE NBA FINALS launched earlier this month as a would-be coronation for Wembanyama, who led the Spurs to basketball's biggest stage by outlasting the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals. In that series, Wembanyama handily outplayed Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the league's back-to-back MVP, and pulled the young Spurs out of a 3-2 deficit by winning Game 7 on the road against the defending champions. San Antonio entered the Finals as betting favorites, and Wembanyama, the youngest All-NBA first-team selection to reach the Finals since 1947, was already visualizing the champagne and confetti that would cap his third season. "The day we win [the Larry O'Brien Trophy], speaking for myself, is going to be an amazing day of the realization of a dream," he said after Game 7 of the West finals. "It's hard to put into words. It's almost like the meaning of my life." When media members from around the world descended upon Texas for the Finals, they encountered Wembanyama's name and likeness everywhere in San Antonio. His long arms and thin frame appeared in several giant murals, on painted signs throughout the Riverwalk area and on fliers advertising bars and restaurants. A poster with a silhouette of his head greeted visitors at the Frost Bank Center, and an Eastside coffee shop spray-painted a green extraterrestrial with a basketball on its front window in honor of Wembanyama's "Alien" nickname. Wembanyama's swift rise to stardom has rekindled the passion of a San Antonio fanbase that cheered five championship teams between 1999 and 2014 but hadn't seen playoff basketball since 2019. The "Go Spurs Go" slogan was plastered on T-shirts, movie theatre marquees and city buses around the city throughout June, and Spurs flags popped up on front porches, pickup truck tailgates and a towering construction crane. To celebrate playoff wins, fans drove around downtown honking their car horns until the wee hours of the morning. The hype and excitement reached a fever pitch among several Hall of Famer players who gathered at Finals media day on the eve of Game 1. Gary Payton declared that the 7-foot-4 Wembanyama "has taken over as the face of the NBA." James Worthy went even further. "It's like watching [Stephen] Curry shoot the 3 with the agility of Kobe Bryant and the dominance of Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] and Wilt [Chamberlain]," Worthy said. "[Wembanyama] has all that combined. It's possible in the next couple of years that he could be named the best player who has ever played the game. He's 22. What happens when he's 25?" ONCE THE GAMES started, the tidy story of a gigantic prodigy speed-climbing to basketball's summit met some complications. Wembanyama shot poorly in a Game 1 loss to the Knicks, who outscored San Antonio 11-0 in the final two minutes of their 105-95 win. The Spurs struggled to execute again in the final minute of a Game 2 defeat: Wembanyama missed two jumpers in the final 30 seconds, threw a bad pass off teammate Stephon Castle's back and committed a foul to set up the game-winning free throw for Knicks guard Jalen Brunson. Less than one week after Wembanyama had imagined winning the championship trophy, he acknowledged that his vision of his crunch time misadventures was "very blurry." He said he needed to display "more poise [and] more control," and he lamented missing a jumper from the right elbow just before the buzzer. "Of course I liked the shot," he said. "In moments like this, results matter more than process. I need to score." The ill-advised pass to Castle lingered as "the most frustrating thing" for Wembanyama, who squandered a 29-point, nine-rebound effort in a 105-104 loss. "It's like [the] body reacts quicker than the mind," he said. "I threw that one away. I messed up. We didn't play great as a team. We needed to win that game. This game was ours. ... Am I going to regret it? Yes, of course." As the series shifted to New York with the Knicks holding a 2-0 lead, Wembanyama seemingly admitted that he had gotten ahead of himself after the hard-fought and emotional series against the Thunder. "Personally, I think I could have been better in recovering from the high of the [Western] conference finals," he said. "But here we are. We can't change the past now." WITH THE GET-IN price to Game 3 at Madison Square Garden soaring above $4,000 on the secondary market and President Donald Trump watching from a luxury box, Wembanyama responded to the circus-like atmosphere with his most dominant performance of the series. Wembanyama's big night began with a thorough security screening due to Trump's presence and ended with 32 points, eight rebounds, and six assists in a 115-111 victory. The Knicks treated Wembanyama like he was the best player in the world, grabbing his arms and bumping him at every opportunity. Still, he lived up to Worthy's lofty praise by drilling 3-pointers, finishing lob dunks and viciously blocking shots to leave the New York crowd in stunned silence. Pairing the NBA's brightest young star with the country's largest market turned out to be a potent formula: Game 3 averaged 23.8 million viewers, the highest mark for a Finals game since 2017 and more than double the audience for Game 3 of last year's Finals. What's more, the Spurs and Knicks drew the highest average audience through four Finals games since Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls faced the Utah Jazz in 1998. Wembanyama's every move in the Manhattan fishbowl garnered headlines, whether he was drawing a picture of a statue at the exclusive Gramercy Park or walking barefoot to a news conference at Madison Square Garden. Sensing a threat, Knicks fans booed him relentlessly and heckled him with profane chants. After Game 4, someone even threw an egg in his direction outside the Spurs' hotel. Ultimately, Wembanyama and the Spurs came undone in the pressure cooker. After building a 29-point lead in Game 4, San Antonio suffered the worst collapse in Finals history and lost 107-106 on a putback by Knicks forward OG Anunoby with 1.2 seconds left. Wembanyama logged 44 minutes -- the most he played in a non-overtime game during the playoffs -- and showed clear signs of fatigue. With the Knicks chipping away, he settled for jumpers and was unable to establish himself as an interior scoring threat. New York held Wembanyama to five points on nine shots in the fourth quarter, and he missed a pair of clutch free throws in the final two minutes. As Taylor Swift, Spike Lee, Timothée Chalamet and other celebrity fans of the Knicks jumped for joy nearby, the demoralized Spurs silently stared at their phones in the locker room. In the immediate aftermath of the loss, Wembanyama cited "execution" issues, "greediness of some sort" and a lack of "hunger" in the second half as contributing factors. After taking two days to process the record-setting defeat, Wembanyama still couldn't believe what had happened. "There were a thousand ways we could have not lost that game," he said. THE SPURS SUCCUMBED to the same maddening script in their Game 5 loss, squandering a 16-point lead to dash Wembanyama's dream of winning his first championship. Wembanyama was active early and finished with 19 points, 14 rebounds and five blocks, but he faded again with the season on the line. Brunson, the Finals MVP, outscored him 15-3 in the series-deciding fourth quarter. Nevertheless, Wembanyama ranked first in Player Efficiency Rating (26.3) during his first postseason run and led all players in total rebounds and blocks while finishing second to Brunson in points. Wembanyama's playoff averages of 23.8 points, 10.9 rebounds and 3.5 blocks have only been matched by Abdul-Jabbar and Hakeem Olajuwon among players who reached the Finals. As NBA commissioner Adam Silver noted shortly before Game 1 of the Finals, Wembanyama is "ahead of any timeline that people had in mind." "[Wembanyama's leadership] has grown tremendously," Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said Saturday. "He's stepped into every moment with the appropriate amount of fearlessness and respect for the moment and being exactly who he is. He's bringing his teammates and everybody else along with him. It's been pretty fun to observe." Wembanyama had no interest in moral victories or consolation prizes given that New York outscored San Antonio by a total of just 12 points across the five-game series. The Spurs' narrow losses reminded him that he shouldn't take anything for granted, and they showed him exactly what it takes to close out wins under maximum intensity. His current predicament recalls the early-career versions of LeBron James, whose Cleveland Cavaliers were swept by the Spurs in the 2007 Finals, and Kevin Durant, whose Thunder lost to the Miami Heat in five games in the 2012 Finals. James and Durant learned from their growing pains and went on to win a combined six championships for four franchises. To claim one of his own, Wembanyama must better prepare himself for the biggest moments by expanding his package of go-to scoring moves, improving his stamina and developing his understanding of how to manage game flow. Wembanyama's first journey to the Finals taught him a hard but necessary lesson: Champions don't get "blurry" in the clutch. "The margin of error is very, very thin," he said. "We absolutely dominated for most of the series. But our errors, our mistakes, are punished so hard. ... [Losing] is painful, but I'm not running away from that. I'm using that to fuel me. I'm not satisfied with not winning."