This was the confirmation they needed. The San Antonio Spurs’ championship bona fides were set in stone when they arrived in Detroit. But the Pistons wanted to beat the contention out of them with a message that playoff physicality will disrupt the Spurs in a way they can’t handle.
The Pistons delivered. The Spurs responded. With Victor Wembanyama fully healthy and destroying every offense that comes his way, the Spurs’ 114-103 win over the NBA’s top team, yet again, positions them as the favorite to win the championship.
All of this for a team that said its goal was to make the playoffs at the onset of the season.
“It’s definitely a night where we confirmed progression and confirmed potential as well,” Wembanyama told reporters in Detroit. “That was a good test.”
Wembanyama, who finished with 21 points, 17 rebounds, six blocks, four assists and a steal, had one of his best defensive performances of the season. The number of shots he altered or downright nipped in the bud would probably be the highest digit in his box score. He had one of the most interesting blocks of his career, contorting his arm in the air to smack a shot off the backboard and back to himself to complete the turnover. At one point, he even played peekaboo, hiding behind a body before springing in the air to block a Cade Cunningham layup.
A great team forced him to get creative, and he met the moment. Most importantly, the Spurs showed once again they can survive playoff physicality.
“I think it’s definitely top five games most physical,” Wembanyama said. “But I think for the future and looking at the season overall, this is probably the team that is most capable of playing that way.”
Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said the Pistons tested his team’s toughness as well as anyone in the league, forcing the Spurs to find ways to meet Detroit’s energy with resistance and consistently dictate the flow of the game. The Spurs have shown they can win up-tempo games when their plethora of guards can get out and run. They can win slow and methodical games when Wembanyama gets downhill against favorable matchups.
“We can play in a lot of different varieties. Whatever team plays fast, whatever team plays slow, I think we can play in a lot of different varieties,” said Stephon Castle, whose defensive dominance led to Detroit’s MVP candidate Cade Cunningham’s woeful 5-for-26 shooting night. “Coming into the game, we knew it was going to be a physical game, so we (tried) to match that and be the aggressor in that, and I thought we did a good job doing it.”
EXCLAMATION POINT ‼️
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Teams such as Detroit and the Houston Rockets have tested the Spurs most of all with their relentless tenacity and willingness to muck things up every possession. They can throw different types of size at Wembanyama to disrupt his offensive rhythm, but he is now healthy enough to fight through it and find his spots by the fourth quarter.
A clear trend as of late for the Spurs is when they get to the fourth quarter and their energy accelerates via Wembanyama. He has been more decisive moving off the ball and creating more swing-swing possessions to find open shooters, while helping to avoid collisions that send him to the floor and wear him down. But it’s more so just a way to stay ahead of the defense and create open looks.
Those open shots haven’t been automatic for the Spurs all season, but they knocked them down Monday night. It was a nice reward for all the work they put in to earn control of the game by crunch time.
“We were so connected and tried to fight against the wall the whole game,” Wembanyama said. “We tried to make it a basketball game and score the ball, and the only way to do it is to share it.”
The Spurs have won nine in a row — eight in a row by double digits, the second-longest such streak in franchise history, per Spurs radio play-by-play voice Dan Weiss. Ever since the team got stranded in Charlotte at the beginning of the month because of a snow storm, it has been on a tear toward the top of the standings. The Spurs now sit just 2.5 games back of the Oklahoma City Thunder for the best record in the West.
The Spurs are 8-1 against the top three seeds in each conference. They are fourth in the league in net rating at plus-6.7 and join the Thunder as the only team in the top six in offense and defense. And they’re in the top five in net rating since the start of 2026.
They look like the best team in the NBA right now, and can make a compelling case to be considered title favorites.
There will be plenty of challenges to their problem-solving and resilience in the postseason. With Wembanyama and Castle taking far bigger roles, they could find quicksand against experienced teams in a seven-game series. But look at how they responded to their first loss in Houston with a dominant Wembanyama performance a few weeks later. Now they’ve gone into Detroit and controlled the game for most of the second half. They are 4-1 against the defending champion Thunder and have shown every playoff team they have an edge.
In this game, it was Wembanyama’s rim protection as much as it was De’Aaron Fox’s tempo control with the ball in his hand. It was Devin Vassell’s incredible shooting in the first half and Castle’s impactful defense on Cunningham. More than anything, it was the group’s ability to keep pushing.
“I don’t know what the playoffs are like,” Wembanyama said. “But I know we’re going to need some of that.”