Oklahoma City thinks it has the most valuable player. Chicago thinks it has the real Iceman. And a Duke dad, apologizing for a crazy comparison while making it anyway, thinks one of his twins already is the next Tim Duncan.
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If you’re intent on looking for supposed slights – as some in San Antonio almost always are – there still are places to find them.
But as the Spurs close in on the first postseason of a new era, it’s probably time for the fan base to undergo a motivational recalibration. Dismissiveness, whether imagined or not, is getting more difficult to come by.
And for a franchise that historically took pride in proving what the hype got wrong?
The next step is proving the hype right.
This adjustment isn’t going to be easy. Old habits die hard, and few NBA habits are older than the communal Rodney Dangerfield routine at Spurs games dating back to the HemisFair Arena days. People adored George Gervin and David Robinson and Duncan, but cheering for them meant lamenting that they got no respect.
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That issue often was exaggerated, especially by the end of a five-championship run that gave the Spurs a worldwide reputation as one of professional sports’ model organizations. But the arrival of Victor Wembanyama flipped the script.
Now it’s a star from San Antonio who’s been anointed the next big thing before he’s proven anything against the grizzled old pros when it counts. Now it’s San Antonio that national TV networks are trying to squeeze into their broadcast schedules over and over again. Now San Antonio is the source of endless click-chasing hot takes promoting them from contenders to favorites to the NBA’s next dynasty before six guys in the Spurs’ rotation even have appeared in their first playoff game.
Think Wembanyama isn’t getting enough credit? Well, the league’s official website just listed him as No. 1 in its rankings for Most Valuable Player.
Think nobody appreciates how dominant the Spurs have been in vaulting to second place in the Western Conference? Well, it looks like plenty of people with money sure do. Even though it would be completely unprecedented for a team as inexperienced as the Spurs to win an NBA championship, oddsmakers now give them the third-best chance in the league, right behind the two teams that happened to win the last two titles.
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The hype already is deafening, and every postseason victory only is going to make it louder. These are no longer the days when a Spurs fan could reasonably claim that national praise for the local cagers came begrudgingly. They’re not the boring team anymore, appealing only to the purest of hoop heads. Now they’re the show every casual fan wants to watch, and this could prove to be hilarious when the playoffs start providing their inevitable conspiracy theories among the losers.
San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) yells into the microphone after a win at Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, Thursday, March 19, 2026. The Spurs won in the last second, 101-100. (Andrew J. Whitaker/San Antonio Express-News)
How long, for instance, will it be after the Spurs’ first series victory before fans of the opposing team start speculating that the league pulled strings to make it happen?
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Those theories usually are reserved for glamour teams like the Lakers, who coincidentally are rediscovering some of their vintage luster lately, too. If the current standings hold, and Wembanyama faces LeBron James and Luka Donĉić in the second round, the league and the networks will figure they can’t go wrong either way.
By then, San Antonio might be looking for those supposed slights again. James and Donĉić will get a couple of calls, and this will be cited as the latest evidence in the Spurs’ long struggle against perceived disrespect.
After all, how many franchises have an icon who’s had to defend his own trademark from an up-and-coming whippersnapper in another sport. That’s what Gervin had to do this week when he learned that Chicago Bears quarterback Caleb Williams had filed paperwork to become the “Iceman.”
Around the same time, a player who the Spurs once unceremoniously trounced from the 2007 playoffs gave an interview suggesting that his son was on the path to becoming “a modern-day version of” Duncan. Carlos Boozer is right to be proud of his son, Cameron, a star freshman on Duke’s Elite Eight team. But wasn’t this another example of someone underselling how great Duncan really was?
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In the old days, that might have been how some Spurs fans took it. But starting this spring?
They can take it as a compliment.
As unnatural as that seems, it probably won’t be the last.
This article originally published at The Spurs have long gone about proving league hype wrong. Now they’ll have to prove it right..