Regret or Forget? Spurs Reveal How They Process Failure and Earned Expectations

SAN ANTONIO — How do you process failure?

It's a heavy question. One the young San Antonio Spurs have had to ponder all summer after falling short in the NBA Finals. When asked at Media Day how long he allowed himself to be miserable about it, Victor Wembanyama spoke honestly about his emotions, as he regularly does.

"I can't answer that question because it's not over," he said after thinking for a moment.

"It evolves with time, but I've had a few sleepless nights... maybe not sleepless nights, but hard to find sleep sometimes, or hard emotions, hunting sometimes," he said. "But there is just a point where you accept that you have to go through it, and you have to feel all of it."

New Jersey native Dylan Harper felt it when he spent time at home this summer. He thinks he'll feel it forever, no matter how far away he gets from Madison Square Garden and what happened there in the spring of 2026.

"I really don't like going back there a lot, just because of that aspect," he said. "You gotta fly into the same airport that you flew into in June, but yeah, I mean, it's definitely still with me. It's probably gonna be with me forever. That's probably a moment that I think we all will never forget, and we'll kind of just - I'll personally just use it as fuel to the fire for the whole year, and the years to come."

That's one useful byproduct of Finals disappointment that Spurs fans know well: it's an excellent power source for elite competitors, sacred fuel for the journey to redemption.

"I couldn't imagine better motivation," Wembanyama said.

Sep 28, 2026; San Antonio, TX, USA; San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) answers questions from the media during Media Day at Victory Capital Performance Center in San Antonio, Texas. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Harper looks like he's tapped into it to push extra sets in the weight room this summer, and he isn't the only one. As this young team gets stronger and continues to build skill, they have earned the much-talked-about experience they made look irrelevant for most of last season. That weakness has quickly turned into a strength.

" I feel like we're all prepared (and) heavily equipped," Harper said, as the owner of one of the most consequential rookie seasons in NBA history. "Last year, we played in every big game you could think of. So I mean, just having that one year of experience taught us a whole lot of life lessons, all the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows that we kind of went through, I think is going to build us for ultimately what we're trying to do this year."

As far as first years go, it couldn't have been more of a whirlwind for Harper or for his coach Mitch Johnson, who also took some time to digest after relentless 13 months at the helm.

"I blacked out in terms of you just ride the never-ending, unforgiving current of this league," he said with a smile. "When you're head coach for the first time, going through your first training camp, the amount of overthinking, what if, second-guessing insecurities happen quite often, and they led us all the way to June 13th, and since, and so it's actually been nice to have some time to take a deep, deep breath and reflect on everything."

Johnson wouldn't characterize himself as comfortable just yet, but he knows that the action-packed year of experience has helped him and the whole team as they try to execute on his main goal of continual, incremental improvement.

"I do think there's something to be said when you go through a whole calendar year, then at least you have a little bit more expectation of what you're walking into," Johnson said. "Last year I was probably so concerned on getting the plane off the ground in every single aspect, so I was probably worried about how many water bottles were under a basket at the start of practice... But yeah, comfortable is not really a word that exists too much around here."

It seems the incremental improvement did not pause or move backward during the summer.

"Guys have definitely gotten better," veteran point guard De'Aaron Fox said. "Being able to play in the Finals and Conference Finals and against the teams that we played against, even just throughout the entire postseason, we played four really... some of the most physical teams that you'll play in the league, and coming in here playing pickup, you can see that guys are used to that physicality."

Sep 28, 2026; San Antonio, TX, USA; San Antonio Spurs guard De'Aaron Fox (4) poses for photos during Media Day at Victory Capital Performance Center in San Antonio, Texas. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Forging a Path Forward

This Spurs team's first playoff journey together featured huge moments against tough opponents. They withstood their star getting literally knocked out in the first round. They grappled with fierce Timberwolves and emerged from the woods with an impressive pelt.

They went to the home of the defending champs, rode out the storm, and silenced the Thunder in Game 7. We can officially check off "battle tested" on the list of qualifications.

"That's something that helps even more than just becoming better at your craft, or better at whatever skill that you're not good at, or your best skill getting better," Fox said. "Being able to physically play through that I think is a key component going into this year."

Fox played a huge part in the journey to the Finals that seemed so unlikely when the season began. It looked like a long shot after the first two games in OKC as he was sidelined with a high ankle sprain, but he came back and gutted it out until the bitter end.

"I'm fine now, but it is what it is," he said. "Injuries happen. I was able to play through it. I played. Wish I played better, but I didn't. But I feel like I have a gift in being able to move on, and I've moved on from it. I reflect, but it's a new season. It's a new day."

Fox found himself on the receiving end of some of the harshest criticism after the Finals. He played below his All-Star standard with a painful injury, and made some mistakes in the heat of battle that proved to be very costly.

The Spurs as a team made a million and six errors in the second half of Game 4 of the Finals, which is the only way to blow a 29-point lead, but Fox's decision to try a layup instead of dribbling it out late will live forever in the final moments of the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history.

It's a terrible way to end things at the mountaintop for a guy who helped bring this team there with selfless leadership, talent, and willingness to play through pain.

"It definitely stuck with us for, or stuck with me for a bit," he said. "But you know, you take your time off. You try to get healthy. You try to just get your body right. Being able to work out again, doing everything that you're used to doing. Obviously, you think about it. It's in the back of your mind, but you don't want to let that dwell on you for the rest of the time that you play basketball, rest of the time that you live."

Fox spent the first seven years of his career in Sacramento fighting to drag one of the most inept franchises in sports to the postseason. He came to San Antonio to fight for titles, not because he thought it would be easy, but because he knows it is incredibly hard.

"We're not just coming in here thinking we're just going to cakewalk to the Finals again," Fox said. "It's going to get harder, and sometimes some teams make it to the Finals and can't get back there. Some teams win the Finals and can't get back there."

"That was one thing that Sean Sweeney said, when he was with Dallas and they got to the Finals and he lost... that was that was definitely a big regret," Fox said of the former Spurs lead assistant coach. "He was like, you don't want to live with that regret, but someone has to win, someone has to lose, and at the end of the day, you have to try to be able to move past it."

Sep 28, 2026; San Antonio, TX, USA; San Antonio Spurs guard De'Aaron Fox (4) and forward Keldon Johnson (3) pose for photos during Media Day at Victory Capital Performance Center in San Antonio, Texas. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Anyone who blames Fox for the Finals defeat probably won't be happy to hear that he'd like to focus ahead, even if that's a reasonable and healthy thing for him to do. Self flagellation, though cathartic for some, can become self destructive rather quickly. If anyone should be wanting to process, excrete, and flush the Finals it's Fox, who can only learn so much from replaying his errors before it becomes counterproductive for him.

Fox's answers are different from Harper's, but that doesn't make one right and the other wrong. It's just a reminder that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for processing failure, or disappointment, or negative feelings of any kind. Every brain and soul is different.

If reading mean tweets and watching lowlight reels in between sets of bicep curls helps, then by all means do it. If that kind of thing is more of a distraction or a confidence drain, then focus on the task at hand instead.

One thing that does tend to help anyone going through anything tough, though, is having your friends and family with you for it. Even better if the trauma is shared. The Spurs spent a lot of time together this offseason, in Katy at Fox's place and then a bigger group in Paris and Wembanyama's hometown.

"You have to go through some emotions, and you do that some of that alone, but it's better to do it as a team," he said. "It's I think a lot of positive things of everything we did this summer. Just being together, honestly, it was it was amazing, especially Paris for me. That was really touching, really emotional for me."

"Being able to get back together as soon as guys are starting to work out, getting back in the gym, I think is definitely huge for us," Fox said. "We have a group of guys that like being around each other. So I don't think it was hard to get guys to want to be together."

Healthy bonds off the court foster even better play on it, and the defending-champion Knicks are a good example of the power of friendship. The Spurs have their own family vibe, and it strengthens everything they're doing.

"Obviously it's good to take a break, but just having all the guys in one room again and kind of just breaking bread with each other was probably the best thing about being in Paris," Harper said. "And I feel like for on the court, I mean, you hang out off the court, you feel comfortable around your teammates, it allows you to be vulnerable. It allows you to say what's on your mind and know that no one's taking it the wrong way. I think for us the biggest thing is accountability, and I feel like every day, no matter what setting we're in, we're always going to hold each other to the same standard."

Sep 28, 2026; San Antonio, TX, USA; San Antonio Spurs guards Stephon Castle (5), De'Aaron Fox (4) and Dylan Harper (2) pose for photos during Media Day at Victory Capital Performance Center in San Antonio, Texas. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

That standard, that friendship, that incremental improvement, that talent has brought the Spurs to top-tier contender status even though they missed out on the biggest trophy in their first attempt. A little over three years after he proclaimed his desire to win a bunch of championships in San Antonio as the most heralded draft prospect maybe ever, Victor Wembanyama is the MVP favorite with his team on the precipice.

"It's great, it feels like we're in our place," he said. "It already felt like this last year when we were getting closer to the top. It feels normal. I would say it felt weird not being in that place in the past."

For the first time in his career Wembanyama and his Spurs will enter this season with a target on their backs. A real threat to the aspirations of every team in the league, they know that not everyone is going to like them. They understand it comes with the territory they seek to occupy.

"It feels like going through something of great magnitude, and feels like destiny," Wembanyama said "We're fighting for the top spot of the mountain, and we're gonna have to move people in our way. That's just the way it is. So I take it as a as a great sign of respect as well."

The Spurs fell short of the ultimate goal last season, but the highly analyzed and publicized ending to that chapter shouldn't distract from the fact that this team outperformed any reasonable expectation by a country mile.

That's why for the first time in a decade, they enter this season with genuine hope of lifting the Larry at the end of it. That won't divert the team's focus from getting a little bit better every day, but Mitch Johnson isn't ignoring the opportunity that the spotlight brings either.

"The expectations are kind of like big games, right?" he said. "There's added enthusiasm, excitement, criticism, opinion, and I guess I'd say I've been on both sides of it now in this league, one way or another. And I'll take the expectations."

As the young Spurs continue to process all of it, from the failure fresh in their brains to the expectations they've earned, they seem ready to unleash an even better version of themselves onto the NBA.

"I don't want, we don't want to hide from anything, so we're gonna face these emotions, face the reality that we have 100 games to to play, 100 plus, and this is the reality of it," Wembanyama said. "We're in a great spot. We're very hopeful, very ambitious and ready."

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