THAT way! Or no way at all?

How do title contending NBA teams build their rosters? This year’s NBA Finals is, as they say, a study in contrasts. The San Antonio Spurs are largely organic, with most of their key players selected in the NBA draft by the Spurs, or are the sort of players that any team can acquire to play for them at low cost. The New York Knicks are almost the complete opposite of that. The Spurs had a tough series against the Occupied North Texas Thunder, who might have fit into this picture, but fortunately for my tenuous sanity, I don’t have to talk about them, or how they were built.

Let’s look at Houston’s neighbor to the south, San Antonio, first. In the sort of odds defying miracle the NBA seems to specialize in recently (cf Dallas Mavericks), the most obvious likely generational player since LeBron James, Victor Wembanyama wanted to go to San Antonio, and in a made for the NBA miracle, lo, he did indeed go to the Spurs. Whatever we might think about it, the Spurs, after drifting along for years doing nothing much, have again drafted a generational center. (Provided his health holds up, he’s very young yet, and Yao Ming, for example, hardly missed a game early on.)

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So there’s one part of a common formula, draft a superstar. The Rockets, by contrast, don’t seem to have drafted that era defining, or even plain vanilla, superstar. Maybe a younger Rocket is less precocious than Wemby? Certain Rockets players have an early career profile that fits within the trajectory of well known superstars, but also within the more common trajectories of Hall of Very Good players. Time will tell. The Spurs might have drafted another star in Dylan Harper, as the balls have been very kind to them in the right seasons.

What the Spurs had pre Wemby was a very good supporting cast tasked with doing too much as the primary players of those San Antionio teams. If Devin Vassell is your fourth best player, you have a very good fourth player indeed. If he’s your lead guard, it’s a problem. Keldon Johnson always seemed like a very limited player to me, with approximately two things he could do on offense, but as a…

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Publish date : 2026-05-31 21:17:00

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