Wembanyama Just Hit Back-to-Back 41s. The Playoffs Start in 15 Days.

That's either completely irrelevant because talent transcends all of it, or it's the exact kind of thing that bites a young team in April when the series gets to Game 6 and the other bench has three guys who've been in that spot before. Both are defensible positions. The NBA is full of historical examples either way. Young teams occasionally rip through the playoffs on energy and surprise. They also get exposed when veterans make adjustments that rookies and second-year guys can't answer. History gives you plenty of ammunition for both fears.

Screw it. We're still going to play 100 percent to try to win this championship.

— Victor Wembanyama, on San Antonio's lack of playoff experience

Look, you can't argue with that energy. That's not bravado for the sake of bravado — that's a 22-year-old who has played international basketball at elite levels since he was a teenager, who has been in high-pressure situations that most NBA players never face. Wembanyama's baseline is already calibrated at a level that most guys in this league will never hit. But individual toughness and collective playoff experience are two different things. One player's composure doesn't necessarily transmit itself to the guy next to him when things get hard in a game-seven environment.

The Experience Paradox

There's an argument to be made — a legitimate one — that playoff inexperience at the team level is actually less catastrophic when your best player is as transcendently good as Wembanyama is. If he's dropping 38 on a given night, his teammates don't need to be seasoned veterans who know how to handle elimination pressure. They just need to stay out of his way, hit open shots, and make enough plays on defense to keep the Spurs competitive. The burden of figuring things out in real time shifts almost entirely onto him, and based on everything we've seen this year, that's not an unreasonable ask [3].

The counter is that even generationally great players have had rough playoff debuts. This isn't a knock on Wembanyama specifically — it's just the reality of the first time. The pace changes. The physicality changes. Defenses are specifically engineered to take away your comfort zones. Teams watch six hundred hours of film on you and present looks you've never seen. And even if Wembanyama handles all of that (which he might, because he's genuinely unlike anyone this sport has produced), the question is whether everyone around him can handle it at the same time on the same night.

Who's Scared of Them, and Why They Should Be

Let's be real: no top seed wants to see San Antonio in the first round. The Spurs are the nightmare matchup for almost every established contender in the West. Their length, led by a 7'4" generational freak who can guard multiple positions and contest shots from angles that shouldn't exist, disrupts the playbook of every team built around traditional spacing and ISO basketball. The Thunder are scary. The Warriors have experience. The Rockets are physical. None of them have anyone who can do what Wembanyama does every night [4].

The 10-game win streak hasn't happened in a vacuum — this is a team that's figured something out down the stretch. Their defensive rotations have tightened. Their offensive execution in the fourth quarter has improved considerably from where they were in January. This is not the same Spurs team that was 32-16 at the All-Star break. Whatever they've been cooking in San Antonio over the last six weeks, it looks real. The only remaining test is the one that can't be simulated in practice or faked in the regular season. Fifteen days until we find out.