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.

Young teams with regular-season success struggle in playoffs

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.

The 2020-21 Suns team is even a questionable fit for the criteria because they had a star veteran in Chris Paul with ample postseason experience (without the level of success he wanted), but the rest of that roster was largely young players getting their first taste of playoff basketball.

Still, the general rule of the NBA playoffs is that young teams, before they can become a true contender, need at least a year or two of experience to shine a light on their weaknesses and show them the difference between regular-season games and playoff series. 

Young, talented teams often can find outsized regular-season success due in part to their willingness to play to their top level more often than many veteran teams. Those with experience often find another gear for playoff basketball, where young teams are more likely to operate in their top gear in the regular season, but struggle to find that extra bit needed in the postseason when everyone ramps up their level of play. On top of that, game plans get more nuanced in a seven-game series, and young players have to learn how to make the necessary adjustments as teams start to dial in on how to attack them on each end of the floor. 

Can the Thunder be a blueprint?

The best example of a team that turned regular-season success into a postseason triumph is this current Oklahoma City Thunder team. The Thunder went 57-25 in 2023-24 and looked like a dominant force, only to stumble in the second round to a Mavericks team that had taken its lumps in recent playoff appearances while trying to build a contender around Luka Dončić. That experience taught the young Thunder where they needed to improve, both in terms of internal growth for their young stars and what they needed to do as a front office to add the right veterans to fill gaps. The additions of Alex Caruso and Isaiah Hartenstein were instrumental in a championship a year later. 

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The Thunder represent an outlier in terms of how rapidly they went from out of the playoffs to a championship winner. They needed just one trip to the postseason to figure out the formula. Most young teams need more time and reps to fully crack the code. It took the Warriors a few early playoff exits before they launched their dynastic run, while the Celtics suffered through nearly a decade of playoff heartbreak before finally reaching the championship summit again in 2024. 

The Spurs are looking to do something unprecedented in the modern NBA by leaping all the way to title contender in their first year as a playoff team built around Wembanyama.

Can the Spurs break the trend?

While the Spurs aren't the youngest team by age -- at just over 25 years old on average, they're the 14th-youngest team in the NBA -- very few of their players have played on winning teams. That includes Wembanyama, who is set to reach the playoffs for the first time in his third year. Wembanyama's supporting cast is largely filled with inexperienced players as well -- especially when it comes to playoff basketball -- but they have quickly adapted and accepted their roles in a winning ecosystem. 

The Spurs' patience in developing young, quality players has paid off. Pre-Wembanyama draft picks Devin Vassell and Keldon Johnson have become key cogs in the machine, while their most recent draft additions have hit the ground running as Stephon Castle, Dylan Harper and Carter Bryant all quickly figured out how to contribute to winning basketball. 

Of the Spurs' main 10-man rotation, the only two players who have played on a team that's won a playoff series are Harrison Barnes and Luke Kornet. Both have championship rings, but played secondary roles. De'Aaron Fox is their most notable veteran, but he's played in only one postseason series after spending the first eight years of his career with the Sacramento Kings.

In the 2025-26 regular season, this Spurs group has come together in one of the most impressive jobs of roster-building and coaching we've seen all year. The Spurs hope that, over the past three seasons, they have already made the roster tweaks and adjustments needed to contend by steadily building out a rotation with complementary talent that blends beautifully on both ends of the floor. 

The Spurs check all the boxes statistically for being a contender. They are fourth in offensive rating (117.6), third in defensive rating (110.3) and fourth in net rating (7.3). They rank in the top six in the league in turnover percentage (fifth), shooting efficiency (sixth) and rebounding percentage (sixth). 

They have top-end talent, depth and two-way positional flexibility throughout the roster. Wembanyama in particular is as unique a force as we've ever seen, capable of completely taking over a game on both ends like few players in NBA history. 

The only thing they don't have is a complete understanding of what is on the horizon. Fox has had a taste of it and Barnes and Kornet can tell them what it takes to win a championship, but there is no teacher quite like experience. For Wembanyama and the rest of the young Spurs, they can't know exactly how they will react until they're in the fire together. 

This isn't to say they can't win a championship, but it is important context for what they're trying to accomplish. It'd be almost fitting if Wembanyama, the presumptive new face of the NBA and a potential all-time great, was the one to do something we haven't seen in 50 years: lead his team to a title in his first playoff appearance. 

The Spurs seemingly have the right pieces, but we've yet to see most of their roster put to the diamond tester that is the playoff stage. And how the Spurs handle the bright lights of the postseason will be one of the most important storylines of this NBA season. 

If they're able to buck the trend and make it to even the conference finals or Finals, they will prove to be ahead of schedule. If they win it all, they will be a true historic outlier, and Wembanyama will put something on his résumé that would be unmatched by any of the names in the GOAT conversation as he begins his hopeful climb towards those heights.