The Mythology of the Climb in the NBA

The road to success in the NBA can be best described as a ladder. Unlike single elimination playoff systems, the NBA Playoffs require winning four best of seven series before being crowned a champion. This typically means that there is no such thing as a flukey champion. Therefore, teams that win often have to experience failure before they reach the mountaintop.

This season, the San Antonio Spurs have the second-best odds to win the title. This version of the Spurs hasn’t endured the ladder climb—having missed the playoffs in six consecutive seasons before this year. It would be an unusual occurrence, but Victor Wembanyama is an unusual superstar. Wembanyama and this Spurs team are forcing us to reconsider the path of a champion, showing us the impact of a truly transformational player.

The History of the Climb

In his documentary “The Last Dance“, Michael Jordan reflected on his playoff battles with the Detroit Pistons, noting that those defeats at their hands helped him to become a better player, to learn what it takes to win in the NBA. Jordan and his Bulls got to the Eastern Conference Finals in two consecutive years and lost to Detroit before finally breaking through in 1991.

This story is common among NBA champions. The 76ers lost in the Finals twice in a three-year span before winning in 1983. The Jayson Tatum Celtics lost in the Finals and Eastern Conference Finals before breaking through and winning a title in 2024. Even an ahead of schedule title team like the 2025 Thunder lost in the conference semifinals the year prior.

The reason for this is largely based on experience. The playoffs present a different challenge than the regular season, and many inexperienced teams don’t know how to navigate it properly. There is a different sort of familiarity with the opponent, where you can’t catch them by surprise. The physicality is increased, the pace slows down, it’s a different brand of basketball. And the only way to truly be able to navigate that is to experience it. And that usually comes with growing pains.

Since 1980, there have only been three teams that won the Finals after missing the playoffs the previous year. They are the 2008 Boston Celtics, 2020 Los Angeles Lakers, and 2022 Golden State Warriors. The circumstances of all three of those teams presents some caveats, however.

In 2008, the Celtics assembled the “Big Three“ when they traded for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. Garnett had been to the Western Conference Finals a few years prior in Minnesota before being traded, so his experience was there. Allen made the Western Conference semis with Seattle a couple of years before being traded as well. Two of the three most important pieces of that championship team knew the stakes, helping Boston win the title after the new look roster was assembled.

The Lakers in 2020 had acquired both LeBron James and Anthony Davis the previous season. James had famously been to the Finals eight years in a row before leaving Cleveland for LA. Davis had more limited experience, but his Pelicans were in the playoffs the year before he was traded to the Lakers. As for the 2022 Warriors, they still had the core of Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Stephen Curry from previous titles, so they weren’t lacking in experience.

Basketball more than other sports has a concentration of importance at the top of a roster. Playoff teams usually have rotations of no more than eight players that play meaningful minutes. Because the game shifts so much in the postseason, it’s crucial that the stars who play the most minutes and are the most consequential, understand the nature of the moment and how to navigate it.

The Spurs three most important players this season are Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle, and De’Aaron Fox. Wembanyama and Castle are still very early into their careers and have never played in a playoff series. Fox played in one playoff series in his career in 2023 when he was in Sacramento. It’s fair to question if their top-end lack of playoff reps will cause issues for the Spurs this postseason. That logic has been sound for the last 45 years of NBA basketball, but we do have to wonder if it even matters when we’re dealing with a specimen like Victor Wembanyama.

A Rare Superstar

At 7’4”, Victor Wembanyama is the 15th tallest player in NBA history. There are only two players ahead of him on that list that can be considered franchise altering star players: Yao Ming and Ralph Sampson. The others were high upside shot blockers and defensive anchors like Manute Bol and Shawn Bradley.

Both Ming and Sampson were post up players, playing in an era that required that of big men. But Wembanyama plays in a spacing era, meaning that he has learned the game from the outside in—possessing a deeper shooting range and excellent ball-handling skills. At his height he is a natural defensive nightmare for opposing offenses. There is no true corollary to what he is as a player, even at this early stage of his maturation.

Wembanyama entered the league viewed as a can’t miss prospect—likely the most hyped player to enter the Draft since LeBron James in 2003. Like James, Wembanyama has elevated a somewhat lost franchise and made them instantly viable. In the case of LeBron, he was a Swiss Army Knife that could mold his game to whatever was required. The unique calculus of Wembanyama is that he is presenting opposing teams with problems they never had to consider before.

More than anything he changes fundamental basketball geometry. In an era where the majority of teams take shots at the rim and from three, he is well-equipped to make both difficult. Because of his height he is a natural rim attempt eraser, forcing drivers to reconsider shooting a floater or attempting a layup, which often leads to awkward midrange attempts. Similarly, his standing reach and wingspan are so absurd that he contests open three-point shots better than anyone else in the NBA.

This sort of calculation and adjustment is part of what has made the Spurs such a difficult team to beat this season. Wembanyama has proven to be a one-man defensive strategy. On offense, at 36% from three he is a real shooting threat, while also being able to rise up from any spot on the court. His long strides mean that if he has a step on a defender, he can attack the rim at will, exploiting his gravity to free up countless open shooters.

If he continues to develop at his current rate, he could have the ability to be as lethal of a scorer as Kevin Durant, just with an additional four inches of height. That prospect is daunting for opposing offenses, forcing them to try and figure out new ways to neutralize Wembanyama, if it can even be done. He is inevitable in that way. So inevitable, in fact, that the Spurs may be bypassing the ladder altogether, forcing us to question how that will be received by basketball fans.

How Do We Value the Journey?

In Game of Thrones, Petyr Baelish (also known as “Littlefinger”) delivers a line talking about chaos as it relates to the search of power to Lord Varys, saying:

“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse; they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”

The line encapsulates the thirst for power, which in the context of the NBA is the pursuit of a championship. Traditionally, the only way to the end goal was climbing the ladder, taking bumps and bruises along the way. There is attrition to the ladder. What Wembanyama and the Spurs present to us, is the idea that the ladder was a farce all along.

It’s a question of mythology in the building of legend in basketball. We often revere players and teams for facing adversity before their ascent. LeBron James’ Cleveland title in 2016 means a lot because of the struggles he had against Golden State the previous year in the Finals and the fulfilling of his status as the homegrown savior of Cleveland sports. Kobe Bryant’s second act with two titles in 2009 and 2010 are that much sweeter because he came close and failed against the Celtics in 2008, proving that he could succeed without Shaquille O’Neal. The stories go on and on, the mythology of our favorite players and teams are often rooted in the prism of overcoming failure.

If the Spurs were to win a title this season without experiencing that very prism, then we would have a thought to reckon with. Are we willing to embrace a team that hasn’t gone through the postseason trials and tribulations? Is that what we want to see?

There is a sort of meritocracy premise that comes with these journeys, that the player has been through so much that we become happy for them that they broke through. For Wembanyama, that currently doesn’t exist. He was touted as the best prospect since LeBron James, was selected number one overall to a well-run organization, and in his third year he has fulfilled the prophecy and hype surrounding him. There is no true note of climbing the ladder, because when you are as transformational as Wembanyama, all the pretense goes out of the window.

The premise that someone is good enough to bypass the ladder altogether, makes us question a lot about our whole perception of basketball storytelling. We have long glorified players for sharpening their skills because of playoff failure. The legend of Isiah Thomas is as great as it is because he lost to Boston and defeated them on his way to being a two-time champion. There’s something about that story that resonates with us, it’s almost cinematic. But in Wembanyama, winning immediately paints the picture of an unstoppable force without the mythology building. It’s instead an affirmation of what we knew all along, which is a different way to contextualize the legend of a great player and team.

Wembanyama’s career will likely always be played in the same sort of expectation bubble as LeBron James. In James’ third year in Cleveland, he had a similar leap. He was second in MVP voting, All-NBA First Team, and led his inexperienced team to the Conference Semis. Wembanyama seems to be projecting a level beyond that with the most modest expectations being that the Spurs will reach the Western Conference Finals.

These playoffs will tell us a lot about not just the Spurs, but about climbing the ladder in basketball. A referendum on our own mythology of basketball greatness. Every other great player has come to grips with the ladder’s existence; it has been an accepted reality. But we now have a talent that may finally be vexing enough to render that idea irrelevant—forcing us to wonder if what we knew about basketball development was ever true to begin with.