OKLAHOMA CITY – Sixty minutes before the marquee game for Tuesday’s in-season tournament slate, the NBA’s newest tall boy is dribbling. Victor Vembanyama is near center court, going through his legs and back again, television cameras trailing, a team security member in the shadows. Chet Holmgren, several minutes before his scheduled warmup time, mindlessly sits at the side of the court, yo-yoing under his knees.
Most novice fans warm up quickly before even entering the arena. After all, the veterans choose first, and slots go quickly near the start of the game. But these two are different. They are the beginning, the cornerstone, and the future of the league. The first-year bylaws don’t apply to them in the same way, even to a traditionalist franchise like them.
On Tuesday, Wembanyama and Holmgren’s first regular-season matchup was, at least narratively, a waste. Holmgren’s Oklahoma City Thunder defeated Wambayama’s San Antonio Spurs 123–87. Despite all their guard-like abilities and future promise, neither of the greats scored double-digits.
But these two have been connected since they first faced each other on the court in 2021, when the United States defeated France in the FIBA Under-19 Basketball World Cup championship game. Had an impressive preseason clash in which they showed why they (almost) literally can’t overpower each other, why they’re both ready to redefine what centers can be.
Now, they’re the league’s two Rookie of the Year favorites playing 469 miles apart from each other. This association is only strengthened by each player’s franchises, who have selected them for the same reasons each has used to create their respective identities.
“Everything feels the same, especially the way they treat you,” said Doug McDermott, who joined the Spurs two years ago after playing half a season with the Thunder. “They really do a lot of everything (beyond basketball).”
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San Antonio is the league’s most famous small-market franchise. From its ABA roots to its dynastic NBA success, it has had multiple No. 1 overall picks that define its existence. Vembanyama is the latest, impossibly long 7-4 anomaly from France, who desperately hoped to join them even before this summer’s draft order was determined by lottery.
Oklahoma City has no such history. This came just 15 years ago, a huge surge in the consciousness of the game, not unlike the state’s establishment. It immediately experienced rapid success, thanks to players the franchise also drafted at a high level. But Holmgren, who missed his rookie season due to injury, is the highest draft pick since the franchise’s relocation from Seattle. Although he may not have the buzz of Vembanyama, nor the dedicated security personnel, what he represents is the same.
In many ways, these franchises are more similar than different. The similarities are more than their status as small markets, more than their mutual isolationism, more than their draft-first team-building strategies and, now, more than the two centers who will not only be the future of the league. represent, but also represent, their own future. It’s fitting that they’re separated only by a long afternoon drive on Interstate 35.
Sam Presti, general manager for Oklahoma City’s entire existence, has been the architect behind the Thunder’s rise. He previously held another job in the NBA: a seven-year stint as assistant general manager with the San Antonio Spurs, which taught him much of what he has done since.
“Based on what (Presti) saw in San Antonio, it probably created a lot of cultural expectations for our environmental philosophy,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “It obviously had a huge impact on him professionally.”
In the context of this league, San Antonio has been old money, with a name and reputation akin to a Fortune 500 company that needs no explanation. Their rings and their trophies speak for themselves. This is the league’s model franchise, one that has defied geographic disadvantages and inevitable market restrictions to win, and win, and win again.
In comparison, Oklahoma City is a fast-growing tech startup. It came not with Tim Duncan and Kawhi Leonard, basketball fanatics who fit into their anti-media ethos, but Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, with lensless frame glasses and backpacks as fashion statements. The Thunder were an invented concept taken from another city that had to earn their place – and, with the league’s best winning percentage since their arrival, they subsequently did.
They both have revered traditions that each franchise displays within its walls. San Antonio has a quote from Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis, posted right outside the team’s locker room in the language of every player on their roster. This year, it has been re-released in French.
“When nothing helps, I go and see a stonecutter hammering his rock perhaps hundreds of times, but not the slightest crack is visible in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it was not the blow that did it – but everything that had gone before.
The cultural icon of Oklahoma City is on his practice court, a gleaming space where even the grass outside, McDermott recalls, is artificially green. After each practice, the basketballs in the racks lining the court are rotated so that their Wilson logos are facing out. It highlights the same repetitive consistency of Reece’s quote by which both franchises seek to define themselves.
But these two franchises are not the same, and they have fallen foul of each other again with their respective big men. Wembanyama and Holmgren may represent the league’s next rivalry, but that’s not what’s on the players’ minds.
When asked if this game could represent the start of something, Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said, “I’ve never thought about it.” “Maybe in a few weeks, I’ll have an answer for you.”
The truth is that it will take much longer than that. Oklahoma City, despite reaching the playoffs more recently than San Antonio, is further along on its development path. Holmgren is tasked with fitting in the core of the franchise, which is led by Gilgeous-Alexander. Wembanyama has arrived at a Spurs franchise asking him to lead them.
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And if these franchises reach their heights, they will be different because of these two players. When Holmgren faced Wembanyama in the preseason, it was Wembanyama who showed resiliency after beating him for a 1-and-1 layup – and Holmgren later explained on social media that it probably should have been a foul, saying, “The headbutt is an unstoppable fasho move.”
Headbutt is an unstoppable move fasho🤝🤝 https://t.co/Oaz7Mz8f57
– Chet Holmgren (@ChetHolmgren) 10 October 2023
These franchises are adapting to their stars, a mutual harmony that goes both ways. “I don’t want to have a roadmap (for Wembanyama),” Gregg Popovich said before the game. “I need to learn where he feels best on the court.” He has given up control as Vembanyama has arrived not to fill a hole like Duncan, but to make his presence felt.
Even beyond Wembanyama, San Antonio has embraced the change: festive-colored jerseys have cycled into the team’s gray and black attire; A new general manager, Brian Wright, has made more trades than predecessor RC Buford since taking over in 2019. Vembanyama is leading them into a new era that may not look like San Antonio.
Presti, once described as a man with recurring haircut appointments on his calendar, is equally adaptable. People around him talk about how he infuses non-basketball passions — book genres, meditation, music makers — with passion. Holmgren could mold him and the Thunder just as much as the Thunder’s identity is molding Holmgren.
And while that identity was initially shared and may have been inspired by some of San Antonio’s genetic coding, it now goes far beyond that.
“He’s doing well not because he was in San Antonio, but because he’s fantastic,” Popovich said. “What (Oklahoma City) has done is not about the DNA of San Antonio, but what Sam has done.”
Wembanyama and Holmgren barely guarded each other in Tuesday’s game, with one exception in the first half where Holmgren backed up his French counterpart. Vembanyama, who was stepping up to reach shots previously thought to be unblocked, couldn’t touch Holmgren’s turnaround jumper. The Oklahoma City crowd was ready to live up to its Loud City nickname. This was the moment they had come to see.
Holmgren’s jumper clattered and fell out. The arena sighed. The game ended with all its anticipation for the first meeting of these two players.
The time has not come for these two, not yet, not until they continue to grow as they are – and take their franchise with them.
(Top photo: Logan Reilly/NBAE via Getty Images)
