There Is No Doubt The Spurs Have Made A Deal With The Devil After Another Historic Victor Wembanyama Performance
Ronald Cortes. Getty Images.After witnessing Victor Wembanyama become the first player in NBA history with 25/10/5/5 with 5 3PM against the Thunder four days ago, I wrote this blog
At the time, the title was mostly tongue-in-cheek given what we were witnessing, but here we are after the next game on the Spurs schedule (vs IND), and what do you think happened?
That's right, Wemby made more NBA history
I know this blog may feel competitive, but what am I supposed to do? I've stated many times how I'm a sucker for watching NBA history, and it's starting to legitimately become the truth to suggest that every time Wemby steps on the floor, he finds some way to make NBA history. A unicorn like this deserves the proper amount of praise, because frankly, we've never seen anything like him.
The scary part is these performances are starting to come against the best teams in the league. He made history against OKC, he did it again last night against another playoff team. We saw him throw up 29/4/4 with 4 blocks earlier in the year against MIN, then there was the 22/11/2/6/4 against the Nuggets, or the 27/9/1/1/5 against the Bucks, or the 21/7/3/0/1 and 27/5/1/0/1 against the Celtics, or his 38/10/2/1/2 against the Suns. The list goes on and on. Yes the team stinks, but when it comes to Wemby, not only is he making NBA history every damn game, he's doing it against every kind of opponent. Lottery teams, contenders, title favorites, on the road, at home, you name it and Wemby is doing it.
This most recent example confirmed to me that the Spurs are up to something. I don't know what type of black magic/voodoo they are capable of, but to go from David Robinson to Tim Duncan to Wemby is not normal. That doesn't happen without some fishy business, and maybe that's the league weirdly rigging things for the Spurs or maybe that's Pop making some sort of blood sacrifice to the Basketball Gods, all I know is that something's up.
How can one franchise be blessed with 3 different generational talents during 3 separate eras who all play the same position? I'm to believe that simply happened by chance? No shot. You're lucky if you get to experience ONE of those players in your entire lifetime as a fan, can you imagine getting to see it 3 different times?
Given that Wemby is this good this early, it does put the Spurs in an interesting position. It's pretty clear that whatever rebuilding plan they had, it's now been sped up. Wemby is good enough to build around right now, and the Spurs enter this summer with around $34M in cap space to add real pieces. That gives them a few options, starting with trading for an upgrade at point guard, say someone like Trae Young. He makes $43M, so a huge chunk of that can be absorbed into the Spurs' cap space, which makes trading for him MUCH easier when it comes to making the money match.
Maybe they don't want to make that big of a splash, which is fine. You can always snag someone like Tyus Jones on the free agent market for a fraction of the price and use your resources to fill out other positions. The point is, given how dynamic Wemby is, it now allows the Spurs to explore a variety of team building options to surround him with better talent. Who's to say they don't kick the tires on someone like Pascal Siakam, Klay Thompson, Gary Trent Jr, or DeRozan (a return)?
The point is, whatever timeline the Spurs thought they'd be dealing with when it came to this rebuild, it's time to speed it up. That doesn't mean make a move just to make it, but you can't waste a second of Wemby as far as I'm concerned. I see no reason why given their resources, this can't be at least a Play In team next year, and once that happens everything is on the table given how Wemby can dominate both ends of the floor.
This is all a long way of saying if you by chance root for an NBA team that has hopes of winning an NBA title, you better get that ring soon. It's only a matter of time before the Spurs surround Wemby with better NBA talent, and given that we're already seeing him make NBA history with his current supporting cast, that's definitely concerning.