The solid finish to the San Antonio Spurs 2023-24 season — seven wins in their final 11 games — produced a jolt of joy and a steep leap in confidence about the future for a franchise that knows it already has a player — unanimous NBA Rookie of the Year Victor Wembanyama — around whom a championship contender eventually can be built.
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At 75 and the league’s oldest head coach, Gregg Popovich declared after the season finale that his enthusiasm only needed only a week-and-a-half respite to be ready for 2024-25. Nobody wondered why.
The Athletic’s anonymous poll of 142 players on this season’s rosters showed that nearly all of them would be very happy were they to be Wembanyama’s teammates next season. The 20-year-old from Paris was an overwhelming answer to the survey’s question: Starting from scratch, which player would be the first player selected?
Only Popovich gets to be Wemby’s coach next season. Yet, as exuberant as Popovich and the team’s fan base were in celebrating the positivity of the last few weeks of an otherwise forgettable season, calm heads must prevail as the team’s basketball brain trust contemplates optimizing Wembanyama’s presence.
That late surge, forged in part by deep rotation players like Sandro Mamukelashvili and Devonte’ Graham, likely was far more fool’s gold than mother lode.
Here’s the hard truth for everyone who wore silver and black in the 2023-24 season but was not a 7-foot-4 rookie from Paris: Wembanyama is the one and only untradeable player.
That’s not to say a major housecleaning is coming, but nobody should be surprised if there are more new players on the San Antonio roster on opening night in October than those who were on the roster, both active and inactive, for the season finale on April 14.
Only a few current Spurs seem highly likely to be on the opening night roster when the 2024-25 season begins.
Devin Vassell missed the final eight games of the season with a stress reaction of the fifth metatarsal in his right foot, but in the 68 games he played before the injury, he was the team’s No. 2 scorer at 19.5 points per game, which is a career-high. Plus, in the final half of the season, he and Wembanyama developed an effective two-man game that became a staple in crunchtime.
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“Devin has turned into a confident scorer,” Popovich said. “He can shoot it. He can drive it. He’s upped his defensive understanding that no defense, no wins. So, he’s made a big step in that regard.”
Despite the failure of Popovich’s experiment using him as a point guard, Jeremy Sochan was the team’s best on-ball perimeter defender, usually assigned to guard the opposition’s best scorer.
“Jeremy is a prime defender,” Popovich said. “He can guard one through four, and he enjoys it, which is great.”
Sochan is far from a reliable shooter. He made only 43.8 percent of his shots and it doesn’t take a shot doctor to understand why more of them don’t drop. The ball comes off his hand with a counter-productive side spin. It’s something he promises to work on during the off-season. He improved his free-throw shooting from his rookie season’s 69.8 percent to 77.1 percent this season by shooting them one-handed. Who’s to say he can’t do something similar with his jumper?
When Sochan was moved back to his natural spot at power forward, Tre Jones resumed his role as starting point guard. He ended up being the team leader in assists (6.1 per game) and one of its leaders, both on the court and in the locker room. With rare exceptions, he was on the court in crunchtime in every winnable game.
“Tre has been Tre,” Popovich said. “He gets taken for granted because he does the same things every night and gives 100 percent of what he has and everybody respects it, knows it and we need it. His consistency is off the charts.”
Keldon Johnson, the longest-tenured Spurs, also finished the season on the sidelines with a left ankle impingement. Before missing the final four games, he had endeared himself to Popovich by accepting a sixth-man role after being a starter through the first 27 games of the season. He averaged 15.7 points per game, behind only Wembanyama and Vassell, and added some finesse to an offensive game Popovich has described as “Give me ball; I go to rim.”
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“He’s a little more nuanced than that now, which helps him,” Popovich said.
And the rest of the players now on the roster?
Each will likely need to wait and see how things go for the Spurs in the NBA Draft, the trade market and free agency, and it remains to be seen how Popovich, still president of the Spurs, general manager Brian Wright and his subalterns approach those avenues for roster change.
Wright’s observations of the many lineup combinations Popovich employed gave him one conclusion: The basketball staff still has a lot to learn about what already has worked best for and with Wembanyama. They are now trying to suss out what might work in the future.
“We got to see a lot of different lineups and styles and we’ve done different things throughout the season,” said Wright, the Spurs GM since 2019, after San Antonio closed out its season with their 22nd victory. “We’ve seen him (Wembanyama) in different places. He’s so unique and he does so many different things that I think he’s still learning and we’re still learning.
“That process will continue, so I don’t know that there’s one blueprint. He’s so dynamic and I think you can build the thing in a lot of different ways. So, we’ve got to keep chipping away at that.
“We’ve learned a lot of different things across the season and what may work right now. We’ve got to project a little bit about what will work in seasons three, four, five and beyond. So, we’ll keep adding to that, but there’s no one uniform, ‘This is the way you can build with him.’ ”
Wright also said adaptability is key.
“Everybody has a vision and a plan you want to execute,” Wright said. “But, if it’s static on paper and it’s not adaptable based on what you’ve seen, it’s probably not much of a plan.”
Wright has accumulated as many as 10 first-round picks through the next five drafts, including No. 4 and No. 8 (from Toronto) this year.
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These can be golden assets in trade talks.
Does that make an off-season trade for an All-Star caliber player a likelihood this summer?
Not necessarily.
“Every year we try to be aggressive, but you have to be strategically aggressive, right?” Wright said. “Because of all the things you’ve tried to establish to give yourself ways to build, you want to make sure that you have different ways you go forward.
“I think we’ll do that. We’ll be aggressive, but we’ll maintain being strategic.”
When it comes to luring high-profile free agents, Wembanyama is a strategic plus that no other team can offer.
(Photo of the Spurs: Jonathan Bachman / NBAE via Getty Images)
Mike Monroe is a contributing writer for The Athletic. He's covered NBA from 1985 until 2017 and broke a few major stories along the way. (Ask MJ,) He's proud to have been honored with PBWA Phil Jasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
