Game Thread Spurs (17-7) vs Thunder (24-1) (Sat 12/13/25) [8:00PM CDT]

[spursparker9]

Ajay Mitchell. Played with Wemby in Nanterre and is on a super expensive 2.8 million dollar contract for 3 more years...

Is he related to Donovan Mitchell?

Why Presti keep hitting jackpot in the draft

 

[Fireball]

10 pages ... very solid for an anticipated ass whoopin.

still

 

[pookenstein]

Bayern seem more analogous to the Lakers than they do the Spurs. Big market, big budget, get's all the players.

Spurs have always more reminded me of my favorite Bundesliga team: BVB. Scrappy, homegrown, underdogs.

I partly agree, but Bayern I grew up with wasn't the uber dominant big budget powerhouse they are now. That started when they sold Michael Rummenigge to Inter for 10M, which was a massive amount at the time. Also Hoeneß took over as a manager.

Still, the "Mia san mia" mentality is what I hope the Spurs players will get. I already see that in Wemby.

 

[Robz4000]

If Wemby can be an effective second/third/escape valve option behind Fox and Castle and be the defensive presence he was before his injury the Spurs are at least in the game late imo. From there the difference will be three point shooting tbh.

 

[pookenstein]

it's also in your DNA to buy every other teams best players and if they up for contention with Bayern, y'all just buy half of their team. Basically the LA Lakers of german soccer

That's all bullshit. Not the message itself, because we do, but so does everybody else. It just doesn't make sense for Bayern to buy players from Heidenheim or Gladbach, because they won't help on the bigger Champions League stage. You buy the best you can get from the shelf you can afford. We get players from Dortmund, Leverkusen, Leipzig. Dortmund gets theirs from Gladbach, Mainz. Gladbach get theirs from Heidenheim and so on.
By the way, Bayern can only afford to buy from the top top shelf on special occasions and under the right circumstances. A player like Kane for example would have never joined Bayern when he was 25. Lewnadowski wasn't a top three striker in the world when we snatched him. Ribery, Robben both became much better players with Bayern than they were before.

But anyway, I don't want to derail this thread with football. Happy to discuss it though in another thread...

 

[Quentin_Compson]

I wonder how many minutes Wemby will get to play. Maybe something like over 20 but under 25?

 

[RC_Drunkford]

I partly agree, but Bayern I grew up with wasn't the uber dominant big budget powerhouse they are now. That started when they sold Michael Rummenigge to Inter for 10M, which was a massive amount at the time. Also Hoeneß took over as a manager.

Still, the "Mia san mia" mentality is what I hope the Spurs players will get. I already see that in Wemby.

I hope the Spurs don‘t pick up anything ever from Bayern Munich. It‘s enough that their shooting coach tried to teach Jeremy Sochan how to shoot jumpshots.

 

[spursparker9]

I wonder how many minutes Wemby will get to play. Maybe something like over 20 but under 25?

Mitch said will be an early sub for him and definitely not his usual min.

lol early sub for him....Wemby's usual sub comes at around 7 mins left remaining. If early sub then probably 9 or 10min left he will get subbed out.

 

[Amuseddaysleeper]

If OKC can have a crappy shooting night from outside that would go a long way. As would us limiting our turnovers.

 

[Fireball]

I wonder how many minutes Wemby will get to play. Maybe something like over 20 but under 25?

24 minutes hopefully ... we are back to huffin puffin Wemby

 

[pookenstein]

I hope the Spurs don‘t pick up anything ever from Bayern Munich. It‘s enough that their shooting coach tried to teach Jeremy Sochan how to shoot jumpshots.

You don't like that "I don't care who is the opponent - I think we're good enough to win" mentality?

 

[Em-City]

What Chinook is describing is what I've heard Vecenie and Lowe discuss what OKC does.

They play super aggressive and foul a lot, and then set that level of play as the standard which causes the officials to back off on the calls lest they appear that they are calling non-stop fouls on OKC. I think it was Lowe today (but it might have been Vecenie) who mentioned that with the number of fouls called so far this year being up (and indeed, so far this year the average NBA game is has 2.5 more fouls/game compared to last year, which was pretty much on par with the year before) - that the rest of the league has "caught up" to OKC.

Do the numbers show this? Let's see:

Season	OKC Rank Fouls/Gm (1st being most per game)	OKC Fouls/Gm	League Average Fouls/Gm
2025-26	14	20.8	21.1
2024-25	6	19.9	18.6
2023-24	12	18.8	18.7
2022-23	7	21.0	20.0

So last year they definitely fouls a lot more than league average, but this year they are middle of the pack in this year and actually slightly below league average. (For the record, the Spurs are 18th at PV/gm at 20.6... Lakers only get called for 19.4/gm which ranks them 28th. Only CHA and DEN commit fewer fouls)

Even if what Lowe or Vecenie say (sorry I cannot remember which show this week this discussion was had... hell, it might have even been Simmons... I've listened to those 3 this week) is true... it would appear that it was just kind of a one year anomaly?

I have also heard people say that Caruso is the best in the league at playing right on the limit of aggressive physical defense and is a "student of the game" who "knows the rules better than anyone". Probably somewhat true but also kind of sounds like fluff.

Iman Shumpert summarises it really well - not in the the OKC connect but overall

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[SpursBills]

I'm excited to see the Castle-SGA undercard these next couple games - Castle's been pretty savvy about recognizing how building up your reputation league-wide can influence officiating in your favor and tailoring your game to take advantage of that officiating. His strength-quickness combo is in theory a good counter against SGA if he's allowed to get away with physical defense, and he might have more luck in playing physical than other "non-star" defensive specialists in this department.

Either way, it'll be good for him to get reps in against SGA, who's the king of sucking off refs in public for favorable officiating bias, if for no other reason than to pick up some pointers on using the dark arts

 

[spursfanfromafar]

Good discussion on defensive pressure and the pressure it puts on referees to swallow the whistle. I guess it used to be like that in the early 2000s. I am reminded of th Spurs-Pistons championship slugfest in 2005. I still go back and watch games from that series. Very static basketball. Lots of isos and very slow pace. But also, extremely competitive defense and that part was fun to watch.

I dont want basketball to go all that far but any defense vs defense matchup is much more fun than a shoot-fest for me where sometimes luck trumps skill. I hope that the Spurs match the intensity of defense that they will be exposed to by the Thunder. And absorb that pressure and work on their innate advantages - Wemby's size and paint protection, Fox & Harper's speed and Castle's strength and guile to overcome the massive OKC threat. Lets see. Just matching their intensity would make it a great game for me to watch.

What encourages me is the memory of Wemby's amazing block of Chet and that whole game where the Spurs matched and overcame a much superior OKC team. This year the gap is not that big. And while the OKC has improved and become even more monstrous, thanks to the added ego boost of having become a champion.. the Spurs have also improved dramatically this season and are probably going to be full strength for the first time tomorrow. That gives me hope.

 

[Knoxxx]

Mitchell was one I thought would be a good pick before we got the 2 and needed to be locked into Harper m.

If there is a team built to stop OKC it is ours. Sure we can tweak and upgrade our roster and will, but coming out 10 point underdogs sounds like a chip on the shoulder situation.

The only concerns are Wemby being rusty, having too limited minutes, and the big 4
playing for the first time together which could take a few games to get into sync on offense.

 

[John B]

I honestly believe Spurs match real well with OKC

SGA >= Fox
Chet < Wemby
JDub = Castle
Hartenstein(??) = Kornet
Dort = Vassell

X-Factors
Caruso/Jaylin = Barnes/Keldon/Champ

OKC are the defending champions and have the experience. That being said, the pressure is on them to beat the Warriors record. Just try not to get in foul trouble with SGA.

GSG!!

 

[Knoxxx]

I’m getting tired of this BS narrative that OKC>Spurs. I wouldn’t trade their team for ours no freaking way. We’ve got 4 players better than their 2nd and 3rd best players. They have a double big advantage against many teams but certainly not us. The main litmus is going to be Castle v SGA. As we saw against LAL, when Castle holds his own against a plus size all world PG, the rest of their team crumbles.

If Castle can’t disrupt SGA and their offense enough, that’s when Sochan gets his chance to once again try and prove he’s roster worthy as a situational defensive specialist.

 

[Knoxxx]

I’ll also add another normal OKC advantage is foul baiting and that won’t be any advantage against us. And we’ve got some real young guys that will only keep getting better at it themselves. Castle Crashing is becoming an art form, where he sidesteps a defender, creates all the contact, and always gets the whistle. Luka wanted to take his marbles and go home once Castle put that shoulder into him and SGA is reed thin.

 

[Area 51.247]

I honestly believe Spurs match real well with OKC

GSA >= Fox
Chet < Wemby
JDub = Castle
Hartenstein(??) = Kornet
Dort = Vassell

X-Factors
Caruso/Jaylin = Barnes/Keldon/Champ

OKC are the defending champions and have the experience. That being said, the pressure is on them to beat the Warriors record. Just try not to get in foul trouble with SGA.

GSG!!

Harper? The Z-Factor?

 

[RC_Drunkford]

You don't like that "I don't care who is the opponent - I think we're good enough to win" mentality?

Bayern didn’t invent that shit. Also easy to say when you’re the richest team in the country and there‘s no salary cap. Spurs have always been underdogs. Bayern have always been arrogant fucks with too much money.

 

[Knoxxx]

If we lost every game a lot of us have been conceding before tip off we’d probably have a losing record.

 

[RC_Drunkford]

So what are the matchups going to be? My guess is:

Wemby - Chet
Castle - SGA
Devin - J-Dub
Barnes - Hartenstein
Fox - Dort

 

[Spursgenius]

This guy should’ve been a Spur

Talks like a spur. Could have had him. Picked Sochan. Question is would our record be bad enough to get Wemby if we had jdub. Prolly not so all good.

 

[pookenstein]

Bayern didn’t invent that shit. Also easy to say when you’re the richest team in the country and there‘s no salary cap. Spurs have always been underdogs. Bayern have always been arrogant fucks with too much money.

As previously said I'm not going to spam this thread with football any more, so this will be my last reply. I never said they invented it, I said I'd like the Spurs to have that mentality because I think it is useful facing difficult opponents. If you don't share that feeling I will have to live with that...

 

[Knoxxx]

I honestly believe Spurs match real well with OKC

GSA >= Fox
Chet < Wemby
JDub = Castle
Hartenstein(??) = Kornet
Dort = Vassell

X-Factors
Caruso/Jaylin = Barnes/Keldon/Champ

OKC are the defending champions and have the experience. That being said, the pressure is on them to beat the Warriors record. Just try not to get in foul trouble with SGA.

GSG!!

Wemby > Chet
Castle = SGA
Fox = what’s his name Williams, Doe, Smith, something like that

Kornet to Hartenstein is close enough for govt work. Double bigs favors the Spurs.

Harper > rest of OKC

As much room as we have to improve and players we are missing, it boggles my mind how a team with SGA and nothing much else special could go 24-1.