Down 58-41 at halftime on Sunday, the San Antonio Spurs were facing the most pressure they had in the brief but spectacular Victor Wembanyama playoff era. That said more about the team's inexperience with this kind of pressure than it did about needing to avoid a 2-2 first-round series against the Portland Trail Blazers, a team they should easily put away. While Wembanyama is the focal point of everything the Spurs do, somebody else on the team needed to step up to overcome such a deficit in Game 4. Yesterday, it was De'Aaron Fox, for a 114-93 victory and 3-1 series lead.
Correlated with the concerns about pressure management is the matter of how Wembanyama would hold up against the ravages of the NBA playoffs. Game 4 marked his return from a concussion—which he obliquely indicated was mishandled, though he did not specify in what way—and though he announced himself with a huge dunk in the game's opening minutes, his team's offense was flat in the first half. San Antonio shot 16-for-46 over the first two quarters, struggling to get to the rim or finish there as Portland's sludgy defense gunked up the works. Toumani Camara and Jrue Holiday hounded ballhandlers and blew up actions early, and a bunch of nasty veterans supported them for 48 minutes of solid rim protection.
The impact of all that defensive excellence was applied unevenly through the first three games; while Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle have both been balling, Fox's first three playoff games as a Spur were underwhelming. His young charges have gotten to go at Scoot Henderson and Jerami Grant, while he's been stalked by Camara and Holiday almost the entire time he's been on the court. Harper was scorching in Game 3, briefly and spectacularly materializing the lofty comp of Ethical James Harden With Bounce.
To Fox's credit, the Trail Blazers' stalking hasn't forced him into any high-turnover disasters, but one medium-bad game and two games spent steering clear of the paint does qualify as an aggregate disappointment for the one veteran star anointed to help Wembanyama win now. The point of Fox is that he's a star capable of unzipping any defense and touching the paint. A team can pay a lot of guys max money to stand in the corner until their pupils can take their place. Fox is here to flay defenders, and that's exactly what he did in the second half of Sunday's game.
The Spurs scored 73 points in the third and fourth quarters, and Fox looked like the player they envisioned when they traded for him in February 2025. Head coach Mitch Johnson said it was Fox's best game as a Spur, which might seem a misapplied superlative to a responsible 28-7-6 night on offense. But he's right: The quantitative lens is insufficient. Fox produced like a superstar, yes, but more importantly, he was doing the stuff only he can do.
At his best, Fox is an unsolvable problem. His speed and control allow him to dart into the paint and apply extreme pressure to a defense in remarkably sudden ways. The only guys who bother him are long, rangy defenders like Camara or Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels, players capable of recovering after they get beat. The gambit with Fox is not that he will consistently think of new ways around those guys or simply win the matchup, although he can, but that he attacks the otherwise mundane interstices of a possession and causes panic when the defense thinks it has an edge or a neutral position. In other words, knowing when to attack is the most important thing he has going.
In the second half, Fox knew exactly when to attack. He nailed stepback threes, including one on Camara, tossed several pinpoint dimes, set up Wemby in the pick-and-roll, and got to the hoop. As someone who wants to see the fully realized version of De'Aaron Fox find the success he never would in Sacramento, it was immensely satisfying. You can see why he makes sense alongside Wembanyama: The former can create advantages out of nowhere, and the latter finishes advantages better than any player of his era. You can't give either of these guys space or defend them like normal players.
"He makes the game fun," a grinning Wembanyama said after the win. "Because he runs. And we get into so many downhill situations and fast breaks, and he facilitates a lot, whether it's by his playmaking or his scoring. He just makes the game fun."
To return to the idea of pressure: Fox needed a big game in this series, because the job of a veteran star is to perform under pressure, to make up for the idiosyncrasies that occasionally manifest on a skilled yet unforged roster. The 28-year-old is not all that forged either, yet he has the responsibility all the same. Game 4 was the first test passed, and it won't be the last. He'll have to keep running at it. Good thing he's the fastest man in the NBA.
