Can Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs win the title? They'd have to upend 50 years of NBA history to do so

Even making it to the conference finals would be an outlier season for a team with the Spurs' makeup

Victor Wembanyama and the upstart San Antonio Spurs have spent the 2025-26 season sending a message to the entire NBA that they are a legitimate championship threat. Their early dominance of the Oklahoma City Thunder raised eyebrows and they've continued to pick off the league's best, most recently beating the Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets and Boston Celtics convincingly in the midst of a league-best 16-1 stretch. 

At 48-17, the Spurs have the league's second-best record, only trail the Thunder by 2 ½ games for the top spot in the Western Conference and hold a 7 ½-game lead over the Rockets for the No. 2 seed. DraftKings lists them at +750 to win the title. Under any circumstance, this would be a wildly impressive season, but the Spurs are doing this with a team full of players getting their first taste of winning basketball at the NBA level.

The last team to win an NBA championship with the kind of playoff inexperience the Spurs have on their roster was the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers, who were led by a precocious young big man with unique talents named Bill Walton. Since then, a team making its first postseason appearance together hasn't won a championship without adding a superstar with a strong playoff résumé.

That is the kind of history this Spurs team is trying to make. And not only would winning a title be historic, even making it to the Finals (or conference finals) would be an outlier performance.

Over the past 20 seasons, 11 teams led by young stars without postseason experience have won 50-plus games in the regular season after failing to reach the postseason for multiple years in a row. Only two of those teams reached the conference finals, and just one made it to the NBA Finals.