Late in Monday night's Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, a beleaguered Shai Gilgeous-Alexander dribbled tentatively into the mouth of San Antonio's defensive zone. That zone had been total hell for the two-time reigning MVP. Now, with the Thunder down four points inside the final minute of the game's second overtime period, Gilgeous-Alexander was pretty well wasted. He'd played 50 minutes of intensely frustrating basketball; he'd been guarded by approximately 78 different sturdy and long-armed Spurs, often by two or three at a time; with few exceptions, every time he'd carved out a sliver of attacking space, he'd looked up and seen Victor damn Wembanyama looming up in front of the basket. He'd tried floaters, and step-backs, largely to no avail; he'd tried hesitations and Nash dribbles, to even less avail; he'd tried kick-outs to the corner, a really striking number of which had been deflected or intercepted by opportunistic Spurs defenders. That was his night: waves of pesky guards and sturdy wings, zipping around in impossible numbers, and backed always by that huge menacing Frenchman.
That Frenchman, by the way, was putting the finishing touches on the defining performance of his still-young career. He would finish the Spurs' 122-115 victory with 41 points, 24 rebounds, and three blocks. Moments before Gilgeous-Alexander embarked on the aforementioned drive, Wembanyama had snatched an entry pass, tossed away Oklahoma City's best defender, pirouetted in the paint, and smashed a two-handed dunk, through a foul, directly in the mug of the home team's best rim protector. Minutes before that, he had sent the game into its second overtime by rising up for and burying an audacious 28-footer in semi-transition.
Back to Gilgeous-Alexander's desperate drive. The Thunder were on the brink. They needed a bucket, bad. Gilgeous-Alexander could've forced it. Certainly he'd done plenty of that already. Certainly no one would think less of him for doing it again. That, after all, is the foundation of Oklahoma City's offense. Here he kicked the ball to the nearside corner, where teammate Alex Caruso was merely open-ish. This wasn't inspired playmaking: Caruso was defended on the play by Wembanyama himself, and Gilgeous-Alexander has been at this enough to know that he hadn't done enough with the ball to warp San Antonio's defense. Wembanyama would have to close out on Caruso, but Wembanyama has swatted away three-pointers from stupider distances. Gilgeous-Alexander had left his teammate some work to do, and in what was shaping up to be the game's deciding possession.
On the other hand, Caruso was aces Monday night. While the rest of OKC's guys struggled to figure out where and how to shoot the ball against San Antonio's unbelievably stout defense, Caruso kept sliding into open spots on the floor and drilling an improbable percentage of clutch shots. Caruso, a career 36-percent three-point shooter, isn't exactly anyone's idea of a premier floor-spacer, but as a release valve for an offense otherwise struggling to get within 16 feet of the basket, he'll more than do. To this point in the game Caruso had made 11 of 18 shots from the floor, including 8 of 14 from beyond the arc, to post a career playoff-high 31 points. That plus his genuinely incredible and heroic defense and the little bits of creative offensive problem-solving and playmaking he threw in made him by a pretty wide margin OKC's best player in Game 1.
Caruso threw a jab step at Wembanyama, as if to head back toward the middle of the floor. This is what you'd expect from a non-creator like Caruso, guarded closely enough in the corner with enough shot clock for a quick reset. It was a sweet move: Caruso knifed back to his right and roasted Wembanyama to the baseline, with a cleared runway to the cup. But you simply cannot escape Wemby. The big man had enough left in the tank to chase Caruso, and with history's singular rim-protector very literally breathing down his back, Caruso had to take an extra dribble and go under the basket for a reverse layup. Wembanyama's huge hand wooshed overhead; Caruso flung the ball up and over but couldn't get enough lift and his layup bonked off the rim.
For a very long-feeling split second, the Thunder were dead. Caruso had been their talisman Monday night. For the most part, if Mike Tirico raised his voice to note a clutch play by a Thunder player, it was that little scurrying bald guy in the headband who'd made it. Earlier, in the first overtime, Caruso had missed an open three from head-on with the Thunder down four points. Because it was Caruso who'd missed, and to this point it had seemed like he could not miss, I proclaimed the Thunder dead, aloud, to myself, in my living room. But OKC retained possession, and seconds later there was Caruso, sliding to the corner and banging home a huge three-pointer over a lunging Julian Champagnie to cut the lead to a single point. He stole the ball on San Antonio's very next possession, giving Jalen Williams a run-out for a go-ahead dunk. Caruso was everywhere.
So when he biffed the overtime layup, I once again exhaled the breath of death, and not only because I'd been sitting, rapt, with my mouth hanging open, for most of three hours. But the ball fell into the mitts of Oklahoma City's tallest and longest dude, Chet Holmgren, standing directly under the basket. Not dead! Life finds a way!
Poor Chet. He'd had a rough game. While his counterpart was making history in Game 1—and however various lineups and this series and their careers might later shake out, Wembanyama and Holmgren will always be considered in particular opposition, until such time as they are teammates on the Los Angeles Lakers—Chet was a glorified extra, doing largely unspectacular defensive stuff and entirely vanishing in OKC's grinding efforts to burrow into San Antonio's defense. Prior to this moment Holmgren had attempted just six shots in 40 minutes, only two of them from inside the three-point arc. His big highlight on the night had come when he was one of three Thunder defenders guarding Wembanyama on the Frenchman's twisting buzzer-beating floater at the end of regulation, and had swatted it away. It felt funny and significant, in the moment, that the Thunder celebrated that feat so enthusiastically: Three entire-ass rotation guys for the defending champions had stopped one 22-year-old from scoring a basket, and they were behaving like the few remaining human characters at the end of a monster movie.
Chet scoring this put-back would not have made him the game's hero, for the simple fact that the Thunder were down two buckets. Still, this was one they needed. He gathered the rebound, took not even one breath, and did exactly what no coach in history has ever been able to convince a single Wizards big man to do: He went straight back up with the ball, directly at the front of the rim. God bless him. It was the very front of the rim where the Thunder finally did die, when Devin Vassell, of all people, absolutely stoned what should've been a rim-rattling dunk.
In a lot of ways this game came down to how the two teams managed the interactions between normal-sized people and very huge people. I guess that's basketball: The rim is up there, the ball is down here, the one has to go through the other. Both teams love to drive the ball, and both teams have tremendous rim protection. The Thunder put small guys on Victor Wembanyama: He was guarded very often by Caruso, Williams, and Lu Dort, and even when he wasn't the Thunder fought not at all to avoid switching into size mismatches. I think they expected the Spurs to try to exploit those mismatches with post-touches for Wemby, where OKC's bludgeoning defenders would fight him for every inch of space and every touch, and where Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein could swoop over for shot-blocking help.
The Spurs declined to force it. Early in the game I was frustrated that Wemby did not seem to want to fight for post position. I am, after all, becoming old, and there will always be an inner part of me screaming Patrick Ewing would simply never at behaviors of the modern game. Eventually the genius of it overcame my basketball conservatism: With OKC's best perimeter defenders attached to Wemby's hip, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper were getting everywhere they wanted to go, and then the size mismatches underneath would bear fruit on the offensive glass, and all while Wembanyama was able to save most of his effort for the defensive end.
The game thus shaped up into something that favored the Spurs: They had a way of getting shots, they had a way of exploiting their advantages, and they had a way of keeping Wembanyama fresh. And this mattered a lot, because the other way of keeping Wembanyama fresh is by resting him on the bench, and that means putting Luke Kornet onto the floor. I have nothing against Kornet, but he really may not have a place in this series. He played nine minutes Monday night, and they were white-knuckled hell. The Thunder picked him out the way lions pick out a sick water buffalo. The Spurs were outscored by nine points with Kornet on the floor, and produced a defensive rating of 113.6, about 17 points worse than they did with Wemby out there. This would be more survivable if Kornet were some sort of offensive specialist, a floor spacer or a lob threat or a slick elbow operator. He is none of those things. He is a guy who sets screens and boxes out and hopes not to get dunked on, and San Antonio's offense completely bottomed out with him lumbering around out there.
So preserving Wembanyama, to the extent possible, was prudent. For one thing, his defensive presence was awesome Monday night. He finished with only three blocks, but the Thunder went about 49 of the games 58 minutes without feeling at all comfortable anywhere close to the basket. And Wembanyama had enough left in the tank down the stretch to punch it on Holmgren, chase Caruso from the corner, alter his layup, and then finish the very next possession with a preposterous alley-oop dunk over Caruso's exhausted corpse.
The adjustments for Game 2 will be fascinating. I think on balance the Thunder would rather Wembanyama play like a stationary floor spacer, even if he winds up more actively involved in the early offense, and so it would not be very surprising to see them abandon the small-on-big thing and go ahead and guard Wemby with Holmgren and Hartenstein. There will be pain there, too, but a standard defensive shape will at least theoretically have Dort and Caruso doing what they are best at, which is mauling opposing ball-handlers. Castle and especially Harper unzipped OKC's defense, and the Spurs did not even have De'Aaron Fox out there for a third unstoppable dribble-driver. The Thunder probably cannot rely upon Kornet's minutes to get them back into another game the way they did Monday night. They will once again hope to get Wembanyama into foul trouble, but he has become so unbelievably good at protecting the rim without letting anyone approach his bizarrely stretchable body. I imagine the Thunder committing to more aggressive rim attacks in Game 2 and my saliva glands react as though someone has just pulled a rib roast from a nearby oven.
Also, due to concerted mismatching Wembanyama almost never got to enjoy his obvious contempt for Holmgren. They had a couple of moments. Holmgren had the block, Wembanyama had a couple buckets, but otherwise they seemed to be participating in different games. I demand, and by God I am right to demand, a spicy five minutes per half of these two behemoths in direct competition. That's not much of an ask! Why, in my day, Patrick Ewing would simply—OK, fine. But if the Thunder go down, it cannot be with their own tree-length unicorn hiding over on Julian Champagnie. Chet has moves, he's got confidence, he's got the size of a giraffe, and a basketball observer of basically any level of sophistication would pick him from among all NBA players as the most natural matchup for Wembanyama, whose towering greatness has already made a definitive imprint on this series. Let them fight, dammit.
Man, what a game. This is not the Finals, unbelievably. Sorry to the East's squads—after Monday night it's hard even to remember who is still "contending" over there—but it would be foolish to hope for a Finals to match the intensity of this series. The Spurs made a statement Monday night, and it was by the skin of Caruso's teeth that the Thunder hung on long enough to make it a thriller. This was OKC's first loss of the playoffs and just their 19th of this campaign, and five of those losses now have come at the hands of San Antonio. The pressure is on.
