Victor Wembanyama made passionate pregame speech, then spoke with his play to force Game 7

SAN ANTONIO — Victor Wembanyama had to set the record straight.

When he dipped out on the media after Game 5 of the Western Conference finals, he was too frustrated to face the music. Even if he shirked his duties, he knew that the only thing he could do to make things right was to take over early and often in Game 6.

What would come next, nobody knew. Even he couldn’t know. Wembanyama has never been here before. Most of this San Antonio Spurs team hasn’t. Every aspect of this journey is coming together in the moment.

Could Wembanyama just live in that moment and own it?

“Trust in the game,” Wembanyama said. “Trust in the basketball gods.”

As soon as he walked through the door on Thursday, it was apparent he had a different mindset. No Louis Vuitton this time. He wore a Thobe to honor the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice.

“When he came in with that outfit, I think everyone knew what was going to happen,” Dylan Harper said after his Spurs forced a Game 7 in Oklahoma City with a 118-91 win over the Thunder.

By the time Wembanyama gathered his entire team into a huddle on the court just before tipoff, he was down to just his undershirt. As stripped down to his bare essence as he could be. He delivered a raw, intense speech. No uniform, just him and his passion.

So what did he say?

“I don’t remember,” Wembanyama said in his postgame news conference before ignoring a follow-up. He wasn’t interested in the speech going to anyone else but his teammates.

Thankfully, teammate Lindy Waters III remembered.

“We just got to leave it all out there,” Waters told The Athletic when asked what Wembanyama’s message was. “Back’s against the wall, and we’ve had multiple chances this series to capitalize and we just let it go.”

Waters said Wembanyama talked about how they were playing with “life after,” the idea that earlier in the series, there was always a next game to get things back on track. Once they reached Game 6, there was no more life after. Just the afterlife of a season full of promise.

Suddenly, a lot of things shifted into perspective. Maybe that’s what experience really means in the playoffs.

Wembanyama and the Spurs spoke in the lead-up to the postseason about how they felt their lack of deep playoff experience in their core rotation wouldn’t be a detriment. They were optimistic that they were playing a brand of basketball that would enable them to bypass the pitfalls of naivety. They didn’t know for sure, and even said “we’ll see” a bunch of times. But they felt good about their youthful exuberance.

The Thunder have forced them to grow up, quick.

“They don’t beat themselves. That’s what they’re probably best at,” Waters said. “They play their game. They don’t get sped up, and they force you to beat them. A lot of times, we beat ourselves, and that’s usually the case whenever we lose. It’s just us. Turnovers, small little details on closeouts, rebounding. It’s just us beating ourselves, and they capitalize on top of that.”

It’s not just consistency or attention to detail. It’s a doggedness, a willingness to do whatever it takes. To not care about any variable that stands between you and having more points than your opponent when the final buzzer goes off.

Wembanyama backed up his words, and lack thereof after Game 5, with his actions. He seized control, launching 3s, defending with intent, not letting rebounds have a choice about where they landed. Twenty-eight points on 21 shots in 28 minutes; he was the Wembanyama they needed.

Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs responded to the pressure of an elimination game with a performance that belied their inexperience in such settings. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

He didn’t play as if he were trying to get a feel for the game. He made the game feel him.

“I think that’s maybe his biggest growth this year. Not waiting for it to be perfect or necessarily to know what to do all the time, but attack the moment, have the right approach, and live with the results,” Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said.

In Game 6, the Spurs played with unmistakable desperation. Not a manufactured kind. Not one that is ingrained consistently, the way it is for the Thunder. This was the feeling of the wind against their backs as they were pushed to the brink. The sound of pebbles falling off the cliff, making a splash in the waters below.

The Spurs say they play well when they’re desperate. Now that they have experienced being down in a series and even facing elimination, they’ve shown their defense can pounce when it’s all on the line.

“It erases all the little mistakes that we do that are human nature,” Wembanyama said. “Whether it’s in the regular season or previous games, you just gotta fight that all the time. And when your back’s against the wall, it feels like the best opportunity to do that.”

It really showed in the moments they have been most desperate, when Wembanyama is off the floor. The Spurs have been hemorrhaging leads in those minutes for most of the series, but they won them convincingly in Game 6 as Luke Kornet was a plus-13. The key was he and Stephon Castle executing their defensive coverages on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander consistently and keeping the Thunder offense from getting into a flow.

In the first half, they broke out ice coverages to keep SGA on the right side of the floor, so that he couldn’t easily hop into a stepback and would have to completely flip his hips around to get a shot off. It also kept Kornet far enough back that the MVP couldn’t just drive all the way around the coverage to get to the rim or make the kinds of cross-court kick-out passes he doesn’t usually do.

Castle said it wasn’t the first time they ran an ice coverage on Gilgeous-Alexander in the series, but he conceded it might appear that way because it was the first time they executed it well. The non-Wemby minutes were a success because the defensive execution was on point, and it made getting rebounds and running in transition so much easier.

It was the culmination of a series-long journey to find an understanding that playing with a relentless conviction as a whole actually covers up the vulnerabilities a less assured group would worry about. But it all traces back to Wembanyama living up to the moment.

“We’ve never done this before as a collective,” Waters said. “Some guys have the experience to go on all the way, but for our core to be able to capitalize on moments, we don’t take it for granted. But back’s against the wall this time, we just got to.”

Now everyone’s back is against the wall, right where Wembanyama wants them.