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Sleep Now In the Fire - Give them credit. They were the better team in Game 3. Not by the margin they won by but there’s no arguing they weren’t the better team last night. This is the first time I’ve had to objectively concede another team outplayed us in the 2026 NBA Playoffs. Considering the first game against Portland was five weeks ago and it took until Memorial Day weekend before we even blinked once, I don’t expect us to blink again for a while if at all but that was a tough loss. It’s also a valuable teaching moment. We almost broke them in the first few minutes of the game but when we didn’t, we lost our edge and weren’t able to get it back. We should now know that letting your guard down in that scenario against a team this good means you lose. That’s a hard lesson we couldn’t have received any better way than being schooled by the MVP and his defending champs. So yeah, it’s a hard loss but one I expect us to learn from and grow because if we don’t, the Thunder are good enough to make us more than blink. If we don’t draw a line in the sand by coming out in Game 4 with a focus that shows we know our season is on the line for the first time and we don’t like this feeling cause we don’t want it to end so we’re angry and about to do something about it, the champs will wrap this up in three blinks of an eye.
I don’t know about y’all but I’m not ready for this magical season to end. It would be very easy to kick our feet back after Game 4 tips tomorrow evening and just enjoy the show stress-free. The 2025-26 season has already been a smashing success, after all, with us having already completed one of the greatest one-year turnarounds in NBA history from 13th in the West last year to the Western Conference Finals this year. Even this Thunder team we are trying to dethrone got bounced in the second round on their first crack at the postseason (2023-24). It would be very easy to allow ourselves to finally succumb to accepting the premise that it is impossible for a team with a core this young to win the title after starting the postseason as playoff virgins. Your lack of experience will eventually bump up against a team that knows how to exploit it ergo the only way this thing can possibly end is with us taking our playoffs lumps. It certainly would be very easy to succumb to that premise but I say screw that. That premise just doesn’t fit with how anomalously special this team has been this season. This might be the most talented young core ever assembled on an NBA roster and I haven’t even yet mentioned the variable that renders a premise derived from historical data null and void…the magic of who Victor Wembanyama is as a basketball player is singularly unprecedented. If anyone is supposed to be capable of computing the ways in which his team was beaten on Friday at AMD Ryzen speed and then making the necessary adjustments to punch right back tomorrow, it’s the fierce young challenger from Le Chesnay, France who’s been prophesized to be basketball’s messiah and hath risen to meet every challenge of his basketball career head on so far. I expect nothing different tomorrow night. I’m not ready for this season to end and while I’m concerned that we are down in a series after three games for the first time, I’m not panicking and I’m certainly not succumbing to the premise that this inaugural postseason run has met an expiration date because I know Wemby is not interested in taking incremental steps. There is a trophy available for us to be bold enough to bear down and take this year. There’s no question that Victor understands this and will treat the opportunity with the resoluteness necessary to meet the moment and tie this series.
Not even an alien can do it alone, though. It’s a team sport, after all. It requires not just individual talent but also five teammates executing a game plan together and when the opponent solves your game plan, it requires making the necessary adjustments in strategy to give them a new puzzle. The second most important person in determining if the Spurs will punch the champs right back to even the series after losing Game 3 123-108 at home in the Frost Bank Center on Friday night isn’t De’Aaron Fox (and what we can get from our all-star vet on an ankle sprain that won’t stop getting re-aggravated) or Dylan Harper (and what we can get from our rookie prodigy on an abductor strain) or Stephon Castle (our 2nd-year iconoclast who has finally corrected his turnover issues by only coughing it up once in Game 3) or even player of the game Devin Vassell (who had 20 points, seven rebounds, and two assists while earning the distinction by being the only player on the team to continue playing Game 3 with the appropriate sense of urgency after OKC had answered our 15-0 start). The second most important person in determining whether we will win Game 4 isn;t any of Wemby’s teammates, it’s the son of a 1979 NBA champion, a Gregg Popovich-protege and our 2nd-year head coach, Mitch Johnson. The Thunder have solved our game plan predicated on limiting the MVP by making Shai Gilgeous-Alexander play in a crowd and daring his teammates to try to beat us from the perimeter. In Game 3, they did.
Last night, SGA’s supporting cast accepted our dare and made us pay. Jaylin Williams and Alex Caruso alone made 8-11 from deep. Control of the series has flipped so the most important thing that needs to happen tomorrow night besides Wemby reasserting his dominance is Coach Mitch has got to make an adjustment with how we are defending SGA. Now that we know Gilgeous-Alexander has the answers to the test, the Stanford graduate who accepted the responsibility of following in the footsteps of a legend among legends needs to give the MVP a pop quiz in parapsychology. Mitch (with a scheme adjustment courtesy of his defensive guru associate head coach Sean Sweeney) needs to get Wemby back in the types of defensive positions that will get Shai seeing ghosts again. Not only does he have Sweeney’s world class defensive scheme designs to draw from in order to get SGA back to being uncomfortable in order to walk down this series but he also has the stories his dad, John Johnson, must have told him about the Seattle SuperSonics responding from a gut-punching Game 5 loss at home to the Phoenix Suns to go down 3-2 in the 1979 Western Conference Finals only to win two straight and clinch the series in seven as well as the guidance of his mentor, Coach Pop, who has won the Western Conference Finals six times. Mitch Johnson has done a phenomenal job so far at the impossible task of replacing one of the most decorated and revered basketball coaches of all time. One of the reasons he has been so successful is that he’s learned from Pop the power of drawing from every available resource to gain the decisive edge over the opponent. Tomorrow night, I expect Coach Mitch to make the definitive adjustment of this series and show the basketball-viewing world that the #BlackAndSilver have no intentions of letting this magical season end. The irony or perhaps the symmetry of the opportunity that the Spurs head coach and Seattle native has to immediately flip this series back on its head is that he’s facing the city that stole his beloved team, the team his father helped win its only title and the team that served as a tapestry for his entire childhood. If any city deserves to be on the receiving end of the first masterclass coaching performance of Mitch Johnson’s career, it’s Oklahoma City. Tomorrow night, the bright young coach who used to bleed green and gold will have Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs ready to stare down the Thunder and go straight up supersonic.
Featured Image Source: The Economic Times
Headline Image Source: The New York Times
