Three Things NBA Preview: San Antonio Spurs
As I detailed a few weeks ago, I’m once again re-appropriating the Three Things I Noticed on League Pass format to preview the upcoming season. Instead of three things I noticed, it’ll be something more along the lines of three things I’m looking forward to, interested in, or want to see. Some of them might be narrative-based, some might be stats, and some might include video. But they'll all be focused on the 2025-26 campaign.
The schedule for those posts will be as follows (podcasts previewing each division with Mo Dakhil are in parentheses):
- Atlantic Division (BOS, BKN, NYK, PHI, TOR) (Podcast)
- Central Division (CHI, CLE, DET, IND, MIL) (Podcast)
- Southeast Division (ATL, CHA, MIA, ORL, WAS) (Podcast)
- Pacific Division (GSW, LAC, LAL, PHX, SAC) (Podcast)
- Northwest Division (DEN, MIN, OKC, POR, UTA) (Podcast)
- Southwest Division (DAL, HOU, MEM, NOP, SAS) (Podcast)
So without further ado, let's get to the San Antonio Spurs, who made a massive trade but then lost their two best players for the remainder of the season.
Fox and Wemby, picking and rolling
De'Aaron Fox and Victor Wembanyama played in only five games together following the former's trade to San Antonio before they both went down for the year with season-ending ailments.
During that time, they ran a grand total of 46 pick and rolls together, according to GeniusIQ tracking. Fox ended up working considerably more ball screens with guys like Bismack Biyombo and Isaac Jones than he did with Wemby.
Those Fox-Wemby pick and rolls were not particularly efficient, generating only 0.769 points per direct pick as Fox and Wemby strained to learn each other's rhythms in the action. You could really see Fox thinking as he tried to figure out exactly where to go with the ball and when based on what Wemby was doing and how the defense reacted to it, which was obviously unlike anything he had seen with previous pick-and-roll partners. You don't ever want to see a point guard thinking on the court, but you could see it with Fox in the brief stint he had with his new alien-esque center last year.
But there were, obviously, occasional flashes of exactly the kind of stuff that we want to see out of them in this action:
Fox figuring out how to work with Wemby is going to be a process, because he's obviously such a different player than anyone Fox has ever played with — different than anybody else, period.
There are going to be times where he thinks he should pick up his dribble or thinks he should whip a pass to the corner where really he should keep it alive and wait a beat for Wemby to flash open on a lob — a lob that wasn't available to him with his previous centers because Wemby is 7'5" and they are not. There are going to be times where he tries to turn the corner and head to the paint where really he should string it out and wait for Wemby to pop to the top of the key — pops that weren't available to him with his previous centers because they weren't shooters. There are going to be times where he gets a mismatch on a switch where really Wemby has a bigger mismatch on that same switch.
That's all growing-pains kind of stuff that they'll get figured out eventually. There also going to be times where Fox leverages Wemby's vertical spacing to pick out wide-open shooters along the perimeter. There are going to be times where he waits exactly the right amount of time to find Wemby on the roll or the pop, disguising a pass as a floater or dropping the ball off behind his own drive that draws defenders into the lane. There will be times where he aggressively hunts those Wemby mismatches instead of taking the ball on his own, because Wemby gets good enough position to justify it. And there are going to be times where these guys just freelance their way into a ball screen and figure it out along the way.
They're good enough and their skill sets are a strong enough fit that they should be able to simply talent their way to points a lot of times, but once they start running this over and over and get their timing down, they're only going to become more and more dangerous. There's a reason both Mo and I chose this specific action as the thing we're most excited about/most looking forward to when it comes to watching the Spurs this season.
