Victor Wembanyama has that youthful ignorance.
He’s playing in his first NBA playoffs this year. The rest of the San Antonio Spurs have minimal postseason experience. But after Wembanyama dropped 39 points on the Minnesota Timberwolves in a Game 3 win in the second round, he wasn’t concerned about anything that his team did or didn’t do in the past.
“We don’t have the experience,” Wembanyama said, “but we don’t care.”
The San Antonio Spurs finished the regular season as the second seed. Vegas favored them to beat Minnesota and advance to the Western Conference Finals by a lopsided -450. But if there was one way the Wolves were going to take down the Spurs, it was going to be by relying on the one thing San Antonio doesn’t have – experience.
However, during San Antonio’s 126-97 win in Game 5, which gave them a 3-2 series lead, the Wolves looked like the young team gobsmacked by the moment, even though they knew exactly the environment and situation they were walking into.
“The further you get into a series, the more tension there is,” Mike Conley said at shootaround ahead of Game 5. “Fans start to feel the pressure. They feel the environment of the games, the temperature of how the players are playing, and how physical the games are getting.”
The Wolves knew the level they had to operate in Game 5 on because they had been in many similar situations before. Minnesota knew the Frost Bank Center crowd would be loud, especially after officials ejected Wembanyama 14 minutes into San Antonio’s Game 4 loss for intentionally elbowing Naz Reid in the neck.
It was an uncharacteristic mental lapse for Wembanyama. He didn’t even know what a flagrant foul penalty two meant. Harrison Barnes — one of three players in San Antonio’s rotation with prior postseason experience — had to tell Wembanyama that he had been ejected for the first time in his career.
Whether Wembanyama was frustrated with how physically the Wolves were defending him, he’s too important for his team to commit such an overtly malicious foul. He didn’t speak with the media after the game. But chances are, he felt responsible for the Spurs losing.
Wembanyama scored 16 points through his first six minutes in Game 5. It was an unstoppable scoring burst that the Wolves have endured from him multiple times this series. They should have seen that kind of aggressive start from Wemby coming. They should have also known how to weather that storm.
But the Wolves didn’t look like they did.
Chris Finch didn’t think his players worked hard enough to generate quality shots early on. They settled for contested threes and were tentative on the perimeter, penetrating inside the three-point line late in the shot clock.
As unsustainable as Minnesota’s offensive progression was, they still scored 30 points in the first quarter and shot 57.9% from the floor. But the Spurs scored 34 points and shot 57% from the floor, including 6-of-6 at the rim. Outside of Wembanyama, San Antonio blew past the Wolves on the perimeter and produced quality shots with minimal passes.
The Wolves may have known what Game 5 would be like. They may have known that Wemby would have a chip on his shoulder and that the Spurs would be aggressive. Minnesota’s coaches may have primed the team exactly how they were supposed to. But the players didn’t play like it, and that has been a problem all season — turning the proposed game plan into the plan that the team actually executes in the game.
Minnesota’s offense bottomed out in the second quarter, shooting 5 of 2o from the floor and scoring 17 points. But San Antonio scored 25 points and held a 12-point lead at halftime after the Wolves closed on a 7-1 run. The door was still ajar. The chance to take a 3-2 series lead was still obtainable for the more mature group.
Coming out of halftime, it looked like the Wolves were that team again.
The Wolves peppered San Antonio with a 14-2 run less than three minutes into the third quarter. Mitch Johnson called a timeout as Minnesota tied the game 61-61. The Spurs shot 1 of 5 from the floor in that span and committed four turnovers.
Their youthfully ignorant exterior was cracking. But the Spurs glued themselves back together with the mature brand of adhesive that the Wolves have lacked all season.
“I thought we had a couple times tonight where we kind of drew the line and said, ‘Enough is enough,’ whatever that meant,” Johnson said postgame. “There are a lot of little things that go into stopping runs and starting runs.”
San Antonio closed the final seven minutes of the third on a 30-12 run to build an 18-point lead entering the fourth. They shot 11 of 16 from the floor in that span, 1o of 14 from inside the arc, and held Minnesota to 3 of 12 shooting with three turnovers.
“Our defense just cratered,” Finch said.
Finch highlighted Minnesota’s lack of ball-containing defense in the third quarter. He already called his team out for that after De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper combined for 68 points in Game 4 to keep the Spurs competitive without Wembanyama.
Still, the Wolves — in an extremely pivotal playoff game — once again couldn’t execute their coach’s message on the court in Game 5. And San Antonio’s seven minutes of dominance in the third quarter run proved insurmountable for the Wolves.
Anthony Edwards scored 20 points on 6 of 13 shooting with four turnovers and struggled to break San Antonio’s aggressive point-of-attack defense, knows the Wolves are lacking the maturity that they should have right now.
“Just gameplan mistakes that we keep making,” Edwards said. “And it’s too late in the series to make these mistakes.”
Even in the face of a potentially game-swinging run, the Spurs stayed true to themselves and operated far beyond their years. They remained focused defensively and stayed committed to the game plan through adversity — both of which plagued the Wolves in the regular season and continue to hold them back late in the second round.
“I think our group is very secure with where we’re at and where they are at,” Johnson said. “You may be lacking things like experience and reference points in terms of what you are walking through. But we are very comfortable with who we are and where we’re at. And we are going to just try to lean in to our habits and our execution that we go over every day, and things about being connected and together.”
Wembanyama and the Spurs don’t care about their lack of experience because they’ve established the winning habits Johnson referred to during the regular season. The once big, bad Wolves, who have been there and done that, did not.
As a result, they needed to leverage their experience as their advantage in this series. However, through five games, the Spurs have been the more mature team. And the Wolves — now in desperation mode — must re-find their maturity, which they have struggled to find all season.
If they can’t, their season will end Friday in Minneapolis.
