Spurs’ Future is BRIGHT with Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox!

Spurs’ Future is BRIGHT with Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox!

What’s it actually mean to you for how good the Spurs will be on the court for the next couple of years? The number one thing it means is that Victor Webinama is going to have a like a runway with a running buddy. Somebody who’s going to be able to run pick and roll with him. Uh Dearon Fox, one of the fastest players in the in the league with the ball in his hands, adept at getting downhill, perennially up in the top of the top 10 or so in the league in drives to the basket per game. He had Chris Paul last year, Victor Webbyama did, but different kind of stage in his career, not somebody who’s getting into the teeth of the defense, collapsing it, drawing attention. It’s it was all eyes on Vic. Now there’s going to be somebody else that defenses have to account for in terms of that downhill rim pressure. Should create more opportunities. And then for Fox, like he is used to playing with Tomato Sabonis, an excellent AllNBA caliber center, but certainly nowhere near the stretch threat, right? somebody that can pop off the screen and then a defense has to account for him out on the perimeter. Fox should see the widest open driving lanes of his career next season playing off Victor Amenyama. And the hope is that inside outside tandem, that push and pull you can put on defenses could help the Spurs get up to, you know, up near out of the bottom tier of the defenses of the offenses in the NBA up closer to middle of the pack or even toward top 10. And if you pair that with what they can be defensively with Victor Wanyama on the back line, there’s a chance that the Spurs could be contending for a postseason birth as soon as next year. Hey, Dan Deine is with us. I mean, you look at Victor Webin, obviously dear Fox, so it’s your, you know, your two-headed monster, but then you have Stefan Castle, you know, reigning NBA rookie of the year and they just drafted Dylan Harper as well. I mean, it feels like there’s a gluttony of talent in San Antonio. If you are the Spurs coaching staff, how do you manage these four? I think the idea behind De’Aran Fox is that it gives all those other young guys time to f sort of figure out what their best roles are going to be around Victor Webbyama. You make the move to bring in a prime age guy who’s been an all-star AllNBA point guard in the NBA because you think Victor Webyama is ready to run right now and certainly everything we’ve seen from Victor Emanyama on the court indicates that he’s ready to win at a higher level right now. But this gives you the chance for Stefon Castle. And also Dylan Harper was not in the plans, right? This was not that was a a stroke of lottery luck for the Spurs to get all the way up to number two in the 2025 NBA draft. Now you don’t have to press those guys into heavy ball handling, heavy pick and roll opportunities, heavy creation and rely on them to be that sort of offensive focal point to take attention away from Victor Amenyama. you now have a prime age guy who’s been the number one option on a team that was the number one offense in the NBA that did make the playoffs a few years back. And so there there it sort of gives everybody else a little bit more developmental time. You can see where if Stephan Castle becomes a better fit as an offball player rather than being a primary creator. You get an opportunity to let Dylan Harper maybe come off the bench as as a rookie and create against second units to give him more opportunity. you give everybody a chance to get better at shooting, which I think is going to wind up being the swing skill for all of those perimeter players. Honestly, De’arren Fox included has not been an elite three-point shooter over the course of his career. This is the kind of thing that we’re going to have to see everybody level up there to create the sort of offense that San Antonio has envisioned here. But the main thing is you let Victor Wmanyama know you are serious about winning by going and getting star caliber talent. That is what the San Antonio Spurs did at the trade deadline and that is what they have committed to here with this extension. And it’s it’s obviously a very powerful message of look, we are going to continue to put pieces around Victor Winyama. We are not going to waste a superstar in his prime. But based on what you’ve heard or what you know about this front office, how much communication is there with Victor Wimyama signing Darren Fox about any acquisitions that the Spurs may have made or will wake in the future? How large is Victor Wanyama’s voice in this franchise? Got to expect it’s pretty big. It’s coming from 7 foot 3 in or 7 foot4 inches up, right? Like voices carry. Um, but I they they have I mean from the instant Victoryama, you know, the Spurs won the lottery and the opportunity to draft him, the organizational understanding was we are not going to try to put him in a box or try to uh make sort of like use the roll out the game plan that any other franchise would. This is a different sort of cat. It is a singular talent whose viewpoint on the application of his skills might be a little bit different than any other top pick we’ve seen before. There is really no ceiling for what Victor Wanyama can be as we’ve seen from the way he stretches the floor, the way he protects the rim, the way he creates off the dribble at his size. It’s really complete blue sky. No idea what you can sort of make out of all of it. There’s so much potential there. And so I think he’s been a partner in that discussion of I’m not going to sort of put my thumb on the scale and say it’s got to be X Y or Z way. I what I want more than anything is I want the opportunity to grow and develop at my pace. And I think what we’ve seen is that pace is sort of exponentially faster than even the most optimistic uh onlookers could have expected when he came over from France. And so how do you respond to that? I think the Spurs have sort of put themselves on the uh in the path to developing on two timelines sort of to say we feel like we can be competitive right now and we’re going to leverage assets to do that. They sent out draft picks. They sent a couple of rotation players to get Dearron Fox, but we are not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We’re not going to forsake the opportunity to develop and sort of slow roll this young talent along with us. I think it’ll be interesting to see how the chemistry with Fox and and and Webyama develops over time, how quickly they’re able to establish a rapport. There’s an in sort of an interesting analog here a few years back where Dearon Fox was the incumbent point guard in Sacramento. They make the mid-season trade to send Tyrese Hallebertton to Indiana, get Damonte Sabonis in. Those guys only played together maybe like 10 or 15 games the second half of that season and it didn’t look sort of supernatural. So, it didn’t click right away. And then the next season it’s gang busters. That offense goes through the roof. It’s the number one offense in the NBA and the Kings make the playoffs. Last year because of the injuries, Victor’s deep vein thrombosis in his shoulder. Fox with a fractured pinky. They only played, I believe, in five games together, six games together, about 120 minutes together. So, they didn’t really have the opportunity to get reps together. This season, the both of them going to be cleared for full uh full participation, going to be healthy going in. if they can kind of find that rhythm quickly playing off each other, that Spurs offense could really take off and then the sky’s is the limit for what they could they could develop into. So Dan, I’m going to oversimplify for a second because all I see when I look at the NBA right now is an Oklahoma City team that has developed this young core that looks like they’re going to be good, you know, for a minute. So I’m looking not just at the Spurs, but across the league because this is what we do. Like we make everything about championships, right? So, when you’re in the same conference as Oklahoma City, I I actually like we parse all this out. We look at guy like Giannis. Everybody keeps talking about Giannis. Like, is there a spot you see where a superstar comes in to any of these teams and actually makes somebody better than OKC? Like, is Giannis the OKC toppler for somebody? Certainly could be. And I think a lot of people connected those dots when the rumblings about Giannis sort of started to get a little bit louder as they often do when you get to the off seasonason. Where would he make the most sense? Where might he make the big make the biggest impact? Well, if he wants to hitch his wagon to another similarly unbelievable talent, that big dude in San Antonio would make a lot of sense, which is actually it’s why the the funny part about De’Arren Fox being the first mover here. He was the guy that got there first. He said, “When my opportunity to get traded comes, I only want to go one place and it’s San Antonio to play with that guy.” Um, but the Spurs with the opportunity they had, right, they get they land that number two overall draft pick. They do have Stephen Castle coming off a rookie of the year season. They’ve got multiple picks heading out several years into the future. They’ve got financial flexibility, matching salaries and contracts with guys like Harrison Barnes. There was an opportunity for the Spurs to say we’re going to go allin and make our kind of pitch for Giannis if the Bucks would ever have been open to hearing it, which you know, TBD depend on who you talk to there. But they had the the makings of a package in place, right? And they decided, we’re not going to go all in right now. We think the best play for us is we make this sort of middle path trade for Dearron Fox. Still a star level player, but obviously not on Giannis’s level. And we put ourselves in position to build around Victor rather than try to get him a second sort of twin tower equal to him. Time will tell as to whether that was the right path, but I think it shows the level of confidence they have in what they’ve got in store, what they’ve got in house, their belief that Victoryama can become that kind of MVP caliber rain maker as soon as this year provided health and that the the structure of what they’ve put around him with De’Arren Fox with some of those other young talents can elevate him to get there. And then if you if you get to that point, now you’re a playoff team with an MVP candidate. Now you don’t have to go out beating in the bushes to try to find that next star to topple OKC. They come and find you.

Spurs look UNSTOPPABLE with Victor Wembanyama & De’Aaron Fox!

Yahoo Sports’ Jason Fitz and Caroline Fenton are joined by Yahoo Sports NBA writer Dan Devine to discuss the point guard’s four-year, $229 million extension with San Antonio and what his presence – alongside Victor Wembanyama – could mean for the club moving forward.

0:00 What does De’Aaron Fox’s extension mean for the Spurs’ outlook?
3:40 Spurs-Wemby relationship
6:51 Spurs-Giannis Antetokounmpo trade talks

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