August 11, 2026
August 11, 2026
Spurs’ 2025-26 Season: From Rebuild to Runner-Up
The Spurs’ 2025-26 season began with a franchise saying goodbye to the only voice it had known for three decades. It ended five games short of a championship banner. In between, San Antonio pulled off one of the most dramatic single-season turnarounds in modern NBA history. The Spurs climbed from 34 wins to 62 and chased an NBA Cup title. They outlasted three Western Conference opponents before finally running out of answers against the New York Knicks. For a franchise that spent two years rebuilding around a generational prospect, the Spurs’ 2025-26 season announced that the wait was over.
Gregg Popovich’s shadow had covered the Spurs for 29 years. Letting go of it required an ending nobody in San Antonio wanted to rush. On May 2, 2025, Popovich stepped down as head coach. He moved into a front-office role as president of basketball operations. The sideline went to Mitch Johnson, the assistant who had steadied the team during Popovich’s absence the previous season. It marked the first time since 1995-96 that the Spurs opened a year without Popovich coaching the team. For a fan base raised on continuity, that was a jarring reality. Johnson did not try to replicate his mentor. He built his own identity, leaning on ball movement and defensive versatility around a still-maturing core. The gamble paid off fast. Johnson later earned the honor of coaching the Western Conference in the 2026 All-Star Game and finished third in Coach of the Year balloting.
Every move the front office made in the summer of 2025 pointed toward one goal: surrounding Victor Wembanyama with the infrastructure to win now.
San Antonio entered the 2025 NBA Draft with two first-round picks and used them decisively. The Spurs took Dylan Harper second overall and Carter Bryant 14th. Harper, a combo guard out of Rutgers, joined a young core that already included Rookie of the Year winners Wembanyama and Stephon Castle. It continued a remarkable run of top-four Spurs draft selections. The team also moved a second-round pick to Indiana in a separate deal, clearing roster flexibility for what came next.
San Antonio flipped Malaki Branham, Blake Wesley and a future second-rounder to Washington for stretch big Kelly Olynyk. The Spurs then added shooting and rim protection by signing Luke Kornet away from Boston in free agency. Those additions, layered onto returning starters De’Aaron Fox, Devin Vassell and Harrison Barnes, gave Johnson a deeper, more balanced rotation than the Spurs had fielded in years.
Numbers alone cannot fully capture how far the Spurs’ 2025-26 season traveled from where the franchise stood a year earlier. Still, the record is a fair starting point.
San Antonio opened 5-0, the best start in franchise history, and never really looked back. The Spurs clinched a winning record on February 25 with a win over Toronto, eclipsing their 34-48 mark from the year before. They then reeled off an undefeated February, the team’s first perfect calendar month since March 2014. By the time the schedule closed, San Antonio had posted a 62-20 record. That was good for first in the Southwest Division and second in the Western Conference, behind only Oklahoma City.
San Antonio’s growth showed up early in the in-season tournament, where the Spurs won West Group C. They then stunned the defending champion Thunder in the semifinals, snapping Oklahoma City’s 16-game winning streak in the process. The Cup run ended in the championship game against New York, a preview of the collision the two franchises would revisit months later on a far bigger stage.
This was the year Victor Wembanyama stopped being a promise and became the engine of a contender. He averaged 25.0 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 3.1 blocks across 64 games. He shot 51.2 percent from the field and 34.9 percent from three. Victor did it all while carrying the league’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year label into every matchup. His two-way dominance forced opposing coaches to game-plan around him nightly. His availability across most of the schedule gave Johnson a stability the roster had rarely enjoyed. Every deep playoff run needs a singular talent capable of taking over a series. The Spurs’ 2025-26 season had exactly that in its 7-foot-4 centerpiece.
Getting to June meant surviving three separate tests, each one tougher than the last.
Wembanyama dropped 35 points in his playoff debut. San Antonio never trailed in the closeout game, dispatching the seventh-seeded Trail Blazers in five games behind a 114-95 finish. Fox added 21 points, and Julian Champagnie chipped in 19.
The second round pitted San Antonio against a Timberwolves team already hollowed out by injury. Donte DiVincenzo was sidelined for a torn Achilles, and Anthony Edwards was limited by a hyperextended knee. Wembanyama seized the moment anyway. He exploded for 39 points and 15 rebounds in a pivotal Game 3 victory. He closed out the series in Game 5 with 27 points, 17 rebounds and five assists in a 126-97 rout.
Nothing about the Western Conference finals came easily. Oklahoma City had steamrolled through the first two rounds, but San Antonio matched them blow for blow across seven games. When the series reached its breaking point, the Spurs refused to blink. San Antonio stole Game 7 on the road, 111-103, with Wembanyama scoring 22 and Champagnie catching fire for 20 points on six three-pointers. It was the franchise’s first trip to the conference finals since 2017. Wembanyama’s 27.3-point, 10.9-rebound series average silenced any doubt about who the West’s best player had become.
A championship felt close enough to touch, and then it slipped away in a single sequence. The Spurs stole Game 3 to even the series, but Game 4 unraveled into the defining moment of the entire Finals. New York erased a 29-point deficit and won it, 107-106, on an OG Anunoby tip-in at the buzzer. That collapse handed the Knicks a 3-1 cushion they would not relinquish. New York closed out the title in Game 5, 94-90, behind a Finals-record 45 points from Jalen Brunson, who claimed series MVP honors. New York secured its first championship since 1973. The series itself became a historical footnote for its tension, with every game decided by five points or fewer in the final five minutes. For San Antonio, the loss stung precisely because it was earned. This was not a team that stumbled into the Finals. It fought Oklahoma City for seven games to get there, then matched the eventual champions shot for shot until the very end.
Judged purely on the scoreboard, the Spurs’ 2025-26 season ended one win short of the ultimate goal. Judged against where the franchise stood twelve months earlier, it stands as a landmark. San Antonio posted a 62-20 record and put a Coach of the Year finalist on the bench. A superstar center played at an MVP level all year. The team also authored a trip to the NBA Finals that few outside San Antonio saw coming when the year began. The roster that carried the Spurs’ 2025-26 season, anchored by Wembanyama, Fox, Castle and a supporting cast built with precision over the summer, now enters the following year with championship experience instead of just potential. For a fan base that spent years bracing for a rebuild, this season offered proof the wait was finally paying off. It reset expectations for everything the Spurs chase next.
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