Jan. 14, 2026, 12:01 p.m. CT
As if he had eyes in the back of his head, Jalen Williams read Stephon Castle’s next move like a picture book. He leaped up to disrupt his intended pass for Victor Wembanyama. The backhanded deflection created another turnover. He sprinted down the court for a transition jam.
The Oklahoma City Thunder finally got one in their 119-98 win over the San Antonio Spurs. After losing three straight to the same squad this season, the reigning NBA champions regained their confidence.
Williams finished with 20 points on 9-of-15 shooting and three assists. He shot 2-of-2 on free throws. He also had two steals.
One of the trends you saw from OKC’s three losses to the Spurs was a lack of help. Fair or not, at the forefront of that was Williams. The Thunder need him to be an All-NBA player to turn into a win machine. If not, that leaves the door open for vulnerability. This game was easily the best of the quartet, where Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s teammates helped carry the weight.
Not fearing what might happen, Williams went headfirst at Wembanyama on several drives to the basket. He helped break down his larger-than-life mythos. For the first time all season, the seven-footer didn’t linger in the back of every OKC player’s mind. The 24-year-old helped him look pedestrian and knocked him down a couple of levels.
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“The reality of somebody this tall, he’s gonna get tall buckets. Tip-ins, he’s gonna get some lob sometimes. He’s gonna do some very freakishly tall person stuff. He moves really well to be that tall. Going in the game knowing that and then not having miscoverages,” Williams said. “He’s gonna get those. You don’t want him to get easy ones, too. Where we mess up a red or mess up a switch or you don’t rotate. You don’t want him to get those, because then that’s when he has really big nights. Everything else is just like competing. Trying to make it as tough on him as possible. He’s a good player. He’s gonna score. He’s gonna make a tough shot.”
You saw Williams abandon his jumper. He flung it out of his car on the highway. Instead, he was a drive-only scorer. He put up 10 points in the third frame because of that. Alongside stellar defense, his buckets in the paint put this one away within a couple of blinks of the eye.
What Williams did here is easily replicable for the rest of the way. The last handful of games have seen him inch closer to being an All-Star-level impactful player. Let’s see if he can keep the ball rolling as they enter a tough stretch of the schedule against some of the upper-echelon teams.
“They beat us three times. That doesn’t really happen for us. They make us a better team when we play them, win or lose. We have to go about playing the right way when we play them. It forces us to have to do other things if we want to win. We were able to do that tonight,” Williams said. “When you play teams like that, you just have to pay attention to detail throughout the whole entire game. Otherwise, the game can get out of hand. That was the case for this one.”
I think it’s fair to say that the Thunder and Spurs have reignited their rivalry from a decade ago — just with a different cast of characters. The former might have the most impressive win of their four matchups, but the latter has the volume with a trio of victories. Williams might not play into the trivial side of the NBA much, but you can’t deny the competitive hatred both sides share with each other.
“I don’t know. You guys control the rivalry thing. I don’t really care, to be honest,” Williams said. “Every game feels like a rivalry at some point because we’re the defending champs and teams are throwing their best punch at us every single game. I will say, this team makes us play 48 minutes of basketball where we gotta pay attention. It’s extremely fun to play against them throughout the season. You can feel us making them better and them making us better as we play each other.”