Wemby says Spurs losing in Finals ‘biggest lesson of my life’

SAN ANTONIO — As the New York Knicks’ championship celebration reached a crescendo at Frost Bank Center on his home court, Victor Wembanyama sat in a chair behind a black curtain outside the Spurs’ locker room, processing the 94-90 loss in Game 5 of the NBA Finals that ended San Antonio’s season.

Several minutes later, the Frenchman sat on a dais inhaling deeply and letting out those breaths with an “ooh” to keep his composure. Wembanyama stared straight ahead, releasing another “ooh” when reminded about some of the all-time greats who failed first before ultimately succeeding on the game’s biggest stage.

“It’s painful,” Wembanyama said. “But I’m not running away from that. I’m using it to fuel me. I’m sure all these guys you named, they’re not satisfied with being eliminated in the earlier rounds or not making the playoffs. I’m not satisfied with not winning. This is the biggest lesson of my life. As a team, there’s no better experience than what we just lived.”

In the moment, it didn’t feel that way for anyone calling Frost Bank Center home.

San Antonio ran off double-digit leads in all five games of a series it lost 4-1, including storming to a 16-point advantage in the second quarter of Game 5. Over the next 8 minutes and 29 seconds, the Knicks would whittle down that lead to five points at intermission.

Still, behind five first-half blocks from Wembanyama, the Spurs managed to limit New York to its lowest first-half scoring output of the campaign — regular season or playoffs — at 37 points. The problem was, San Antonio failed to execute consistently on offense.

“There’s a lot that goes into it,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. “We didn’t deserve to win the games. There’s a lot of levels of execution. There can be rebounding. There can be end-of-game details. There can be starting the game where you get the lead and then you don’t sustain that. We weren’t ready to win an NBA championship. The better team won. We did a lot of good things, and we didn’t finish the job.”

That’s what stung most for Wembanyama.

The storyline nearly became about a 20-year-old rookie in Dylan Harper playing beyond his years, scoring a team-high 25 points, paired with Wembanyama’s lockdown early defense and a resurgent performance from Julian Champagnie, who shook off a 3-point shooting slump to drill four shots from range.

“There were a lot of possessions I want to take back and do differently,” Harper said.

But the Knicks ran off a 10-0 scoring run in the fourth quarter to deadlock the contest with 4:48 left to play. They closed on a 21-7 run, with NBA Finals MVP Jalen Brunson scoring 15 of those points on 4-of-6 shooting. Brunson would finish with a game-high 45 points.

New York’s four wins in the series came by a combined 16 points, which ties for the third-smallest margin in four wins by a championship team.

“The margin for error is very thin,” Wembanyama said. “Our domination stints are absolute. We absolutely dominated for most of the series. But our errors, our mistakes are punished so hard that we can’t have ups and downs like this so much, you know? The ups are OK. The downs are the reason we lost.”

Wembanyama experienced plenty of those in the series, averaging just 7.8 points in the fourth quarter over five games on 34% shooting with 3.2 rebounds for a team that needed him at peak performance to protect all the late leads it surrendered.

NBA Sixth Man of the Year Keldon Johnson of the Spurs stood near the entrance to the locker room in a black cowboy hat and a brown leather jacket, wiping away tears with a gray towel throughout his postgame interview. Johnson explained the “genuine love” the young team developed for one another over the course of a campaign that defied preseason expectations.

San Antonio forward Devin Vassell, meanwhile, closed his eyes, as the smell of lit cigars wafted through the air. He tapped the table loudly with his fingertips every time the Knicks’ celebration grew louder during his postgame interview.

“Hearing that right now, seeing them storming the court on our home court, it’s tough,” Vassell said. “We don’t want a participation trophy to where we just got here. We wanted to win.”

All the Spurs did. They sincerely believed they would pull it off too. None of them cared about being the youngest team — with an average age of 25 — to reach the NBA Finals since the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers, who won the title that season in six games after trailing the Philadelphia 76ers 2-0.

Ultimately, San Antonio lost three consecutive games at Frost Bank for the first time this campaign (regular season or playoffs).

“What I’m pissed about is, there’s probably a hundred games before we can be back in the Finals,” Wembanyama said. “I don’t know how to say it in English. But I’m going to have to hold that inside of me, slow down, wait and execute for a hundred games. It’s going to be all of it [shaping my mentality in the future]; who we are, what we’re made of, our experiences.

“This has been a hell of a year in terms of experience. I don’t think we could have learned more and gained more experience in one playoff run and in one season, and personally in 18 months. This is the biggest lesson of my life, the biggest learning moment. I can’t tell you exactly what the lesson is. But we’re learning from that. I’m learning more than any other time in my life.”

ESPN Research contributed to this report.