How the Spurs have arrived at the NBA Finals, well ahead of schedule

Late Saturday night, Keldon Johnson stood inside a still-buzzing visitors locker room in Oklahoma City, surveyed the bedlam surrounding him and tried to fathom the unfathomable.

Atop his head, the Spurs forward was wearing one of his trademark Stetson cowboy hats. Almost everyone else in the room – starters, benchwarmers, G Leaguers and team staffers – had donned crisp black ballcaps bearing the Spurs’ logo that proclaimed the next stop in the team’s magical mystery tour of a season:

“This is one of the most emotional, rewarding nights I’ve ever been a part of,” said Johnson, the only player in franchise history to endure six seasons without a playoff berth. “Starting with last year, coming in this year, believing in ourselves. It takes a village to be where we’re at.”

One season after finishing with the third-worst record in the Western Conference, two seasons after posting a second consecutive 22-win campaign, the Spurs are headed to the Finals for the seventh time in franchise history and first time since 2014.

The Spurs face the New York Knicks, in a rematch of the 1999 Finals that produced the first of five title banners hanging in the Frost Bank Center rafters. Game 1 is Wednesday in San Antonio (7:30 p.m., ABC).

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Supposedly too young, too callow, too inexperienced for any of this, the Spurs got here by knocking off defending champion Oklahoma City in Game 7, on the road, by way of a brutally professional 111-103 victory Saturday.

It was the type of triumph authored by a defiant team bent on bucking basketball history, in no mood to wait its turn.

“Words like competitiveness, resolve, togetherness, execution, habits,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “They don’t give a damn about the word ‘experience.’ ”

Victor Wembanyama was named the Western Conference finals MVP, following a series in which he averaged 27.3 points, 10.4 rebounds and 2.7 blocks. He closed out the Thunder with 22 points in Game 7.

The 22-year-old Frenchman did not so much outduel two-time league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as survive him. Gilgeous-Alexander went down swinging with 35 points, doing everything he could to keep OKC’s title defense afloat.

Wembanyama and the Spurs, however, left the Paycom Center with a Western Conference championship trophy under one arm and a date with the Knicks on the calendar.

“I want to have this feeling plenty, plenty more times in my life,” an emotional Wembanyama said.

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For the Spurs, Saturday fulfilled the promise first planted three years ago, when they won the NBA draft lottery and the right to select Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 game-changing, franchise-altering savant from France.

Still, nobody expected Wembanyama’s Spurs to come this far, this fast. Least of all Wembanyama’s Spurs.

Back in October, a few weeks before the start of his third NBA campaign, Wembanayma was asked what it would make for a successful Spurs season.

Just make the playoffs, he said then. To Wembanyama, at least a sixth-place finish in the rugged Western Conference would constitute progress.

The bar seemed somewhat high at the time, considering the Spurs hadn’t qualified for the postseason bracket since 2019. It seems absurdly low now.

“At some point,” forward Julian Champagnie said, “we started to realize we had something special.”

The Spurs won 62 games, then fought their way through two rounds of their first playoff run together. Saturday, in the biggest game of many of their lives, they dethroned the champs on the champs’ home floor.

After Saturday’s clincher, Wembanyama explained how his expectations for the season changed over time.

“When you lay a brick like this every time you get a chance, and you lay it perfectly fine, at the end of the day, you get a big castle,” Wembanyama said. “This is just like the entry of our castle.”

In the last hours before tipoff Saturday, the Spurs’ locker room projected a sense of business-as-usual confidence.

As the 2000s-era Shaggy song “It Wasn’t Me” bounced off the walls — courtesy of Keldon Johnson’s infernal omnipresent speaker system — the Spurs asked themselves a non-musical question.

“Why not us?” Champagnie said.

For four quarters against the mighty Thunder, the Spurs gave their answer. There was no good reason why not.

In only the second road victory in Game 7 in Spurs history, the contributions came not only from Wembanyama, but from the team general manager Brian Wright had assembled around him.

Stephon Castle, the No. 4 pick in 2024, had 16 points and continued his series-long habit of making Gilgeous-Alexander’s existence miserable on defense. De’Aaron Fox, an All-Star guard rescued via trade with Sacramento in February 2025, added 15 points and a dose of veteran calm.

Champagnie, reclaimed off the waiver wire scrap heap after being jettisoned from Philadelphia in 2023, threw in 20 points and six 3-pointers.

Rookie Dylan Harper, the No. 2 pick last June, gave 12 points off the bench. Luke Kornet, the veteran center the Spurs signed away from Boston over the summer, logged six minutes but still managed to come up with a momentum-stopping stuff of OKC’s Isaiah Hartenstein late in the fourth quarter.

With the season in the balance, seven Spurs players scored in double figures.

Kornet, who won an NBA championship with the Celtics in 2024, said he too was a bit shocked at the steps this Spurs team managed to skip en route to the Finals.

“I think you just try to win every game,” Kornet said. “And all of a sudden you look up and you’re where you’re at.”

Then there was Keldon Johnson, the 29^th overall pick in 2019, who once thought he would never look up to see such a day.

The longest-tenured member of the roster, Johnson toiled through some of the darkest days in franchise history to get to this point. There were times he wondered if the struggles would ever end, or if it would be worth it when they did.

“Just really not knowing what’s really going on and not knowing the direction,” Johnson said. “I had a lot of doubts.”

Those doubts had long vanished before Saturday, when Johnson threw in two key fourth-quarter 3-pointers to beat back the Thunder’s last gasp.

After the final horn, Johnson did his best to make sense of the surreal, to at last believe the unbelievable.

The ball caps didn’t lie. The Spurs — his Spurs — were headed to the NBA Finals.

As a celebration years in the making swirled around him, Johnson summed up the team’s improbable journey with two adjectives.

“It was tough,” he said. “But it was worth it.”