After two rough endings, why Wemby and the Spurs are a long way from panic

AUSTIN - Victor Wembanyama couldn't quite make it around an Amen corner Friday night. But even his dejection came with a bright side.

In the NBA, as at Augusta National, people really don't start to care if you can navigate the toughest hazards until the spring.

The next time Wembanyama takes aim at Houston's pine tree on a pogo stick, he will do so with a little more course knowledge, as well as a better approach. In April or May, if the Rockets again put Amen Thompson on him with a game on the line, he might try what he wished he'd attempted in the closing seconds of a 114-110 Spurs loss at Moody Center.

"I would've dunked the ball," Wembanyama said.

Maybe Thompson will have something to say about that the next time, just as he did Friday with a right-handed swat of Wembanyama's left-handed layup. The 6-foot-7 forward went three picks after the 7-4 center in the 2023 draft, but he's not exactly intimidated by the disparity in height or hype.

"I can jump pretty high," Thompson told reporters after the game . "I wouldn't try to keep ducking (in on) me, but you know, if they want to, they can."

That's the kind of early-season bravado the Spurs oozed a year ago, when they were the young guys piling up highlights and victories against established contenders with targets on their backs. Back then, some of those established contenders assumed they were good enough to turn things on when it mattered.

But that assumption was a mistake. And now the Spurs have to avoid making the same one.

As guard De'Aaron Fox put it standing in the middle of a borrowed University of Texas home locker room Friday night, the Spurs "can't just expect to flip a switch when the games start counting."

Even though their two opening-week losses came against probably the two best non-San Antonio teams in the Western Conference, the current version of the Spurs is not even close to what they expect from themselves, and Fox noted there's probably a reason for that.

"Our preseason was (poopy)," Fox said, using a less family-friendly term for that sentiment.

And really, it was easy to see all of this coming. Say what you will about how these guys are highly paid professionals, and about how it's their job to treat exhibition dates against Atlanta and Phoenix like they're the most important thing in the world, you don't need to consult UT's newly renowned fourth-and-2 data analytics platform to explain why that didn't happen.

Of course a group of guys who just played in the NBA Finals four months ago were going to be challenged to approach October with the same winner-take-all urgency. And of course good teams like the Thunder and Rockets, who both entered this season with things to prove against the reigning conference champs, would be ready to pounce on every Spurs misstep.

An 0-2 start isn't reason for anything in the same stratosphere as panic, and it's not even unique among teams that played for a league championship last June. The New York Knicks, you might have noticed, also dropped their first two games of the season, and the Spurs have at least a couple of reasons to think their return to action has been a little better than that.

For one, no San Antonio player has had to publicly express his disappointment with the franchise the way extension-seeking Knicks star Karl-Anthony Towns has .

For another, Spurs' ownership thus far has not been reported to have used the success of last season to rope team employees into more cybersecurity training, the way James Dolan's Knicks reportedly did with a championship ring phishing email .

So far, at least, the vibes around the Spurs remain rightfully and overwhelmingly positive, and that was evident even when coach Mitch Johnson and his players couldn't help chuckling at the inevitable questions Friday about whether there's reason for "concern."

"How many games are left?" Dylan Harper asked, knowing that the answer lands somewhere between 80 and 108.

Obviously, that doesn't mean the first two don't count. And obviously, that doesn't mean the little hiccups accompanying the team's increasing usage of a Harper-Fox-Stephon Castle lineup are guaranteed to work themselves out.

Adjustments will be necessary. That's true of not only the three point guards, but also of everybody on the roster.

It isn't supposed to look now like it's supposed to look in the spring. Gregg Popovich's teams, the best of which built toward a post-rodeo peak, always understood that.

But those teams also didn't take progress for granted. In the fall of 2013, the last time the Spurs were coming off an NBA Finals heartbreak, they knew that what mattered most was what happened the following June.

But even with that knowledge? Those Spurs still started the regular season 13-1, and remained relentless all the way through their championship redemption tour.

This time, it probably won't go as smoothly. This version of the Spurs hasn't been together as long. And just as some worried last season about whether they had enough experience to make it through the playoffs, having never done it before? The same question can be asked about whether they know enough to handle a Finals hangover.

Wembanyama and company already proved once that experience is overrated. Now, in a different way, they have to do it again.

And if that process takes him back to basketball's Amen corner?

At least now he knows which shot not to try.