Rich on Wemby & Spurs’ Chances to Return to the NBA Finals in the Coming Years

The Spurs led for 72% of the NBA Finals and lost in five to the Knicks, blowing four games they were heavily favored to win. So when Rich looks at Victor Wembanyama and asks whether San Antonio gets back to the Finals in the coming years, his answer carries a warning that came straight out of the loss: arriving early is not the same as coming back.

Rich and the crew walked through the carnage first. ESPN Analytics had the Spurs at a 91.6% chance to win one game when they were up 13 through the third quarter. Another they led by two with a minute left, 72.8%. They were up 20 with 9:33 to go in the fourth of another, nearly 100%. Up 10 with 7:54 left in the fifth game, 95.4%. They lost all four.

The combined odds were absurd. Michael Mulvihill, Fox's analytics and ratings man, put the Knicks coming back to win all four of those scenarios at 237,867 to one.

"So if you bet a dollar on that, you've got a quarter of a million dollars," Rich said. "You parlay that whole thing together."

The Spurs outplayed New York and still lost. They led for 72% of the series. But they didn't finish, went the consensus on set, and games are 48 minutes.

Wembanyama himself summed up the lesson. "One of many things I learned is the margin of error is very, very thin," he said. "Our domination stints are absolute. We absolutely dominated for most of the series. But our errors, our mistakes are punished so hard that we can't have ups and downs like this so much. The ups are okay, the downs, it's the reason we lost."

That is where Rich's optimism gets complicated. He invoked the Thunder photograph circulating the last two days, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, and Kevin Durant in those uniforms, the cautionary tale every young team has to outrun.

"Sports are littered with teams filled with young people that overachieve, or arrive early," Rich said. "Then you go, 'Oh, they're going to be back.' And then they're never back."

His bottom line: now would be the time to take advantage of it, because the Spurs are that good and so is Wembanyama. "He's just completely different from anybody else," Rich said. The talent gives San Antonio a real window. The Finals just proved that having a window and finishing through it are two very different things.