The San Antonio Spurs may be a budding NBA dynasty, with tons of young, elite players and a draft success that won't be able to be replicated anytime soon.
The San Antonio Spurs may be a budding NBA dynasty. San Antonio just ousted the previous budding dynasty, the Oklahoma City Thunder, on the way to the NBA Finals. They may not have the draft picks the Thunder do, but they have a ton of young, elite players and are poised to dominate the NBA.
They did this with some lottery luck as well as shrewd moves elsewhere. Primarily, they’ve been built through the draft, which is often regarded as the best, most ethical way of doing it. Moving forward, though, what the Spurs did has now been made impossible.
Stephon Castle, Victor Wembanyama, and Dylan Harper are three of the best young players in the NBA. They’re a prime reason the San Antonio Spurs are in the NBA Finals now. They’ll take on the New York Knicks after surviving a seven-game prize fight with the reigning NBA champions.
Wembanyama was huge all series. He looked like the best player in the world. Castle was pretty great, too, and Harper looked so much better in these moments than a rookie should. It’s those three that represent San Antonio’s luck and skill in the draft.
They landed the first overall pick in 2023, and of course, took Wembanyama. Then, they picked fourth in 2024, getting eventual Rookie of the Year Castle. Ridiculous lottery luck (jumping from eighth to second) landed them Dylan Harper.
Now, that would literally be impossible. The NBA just changed the lottery to combat tanking, and teams are prohibited from getting three consecutive top-five picks. No team will be able to get a Wembanyama, a Castle, and a Harper again.
It’s no secret that the new lottery system is much worse than the old one. Under the new system, the bottom three records do not have the best chance at the first pick. The middle range, 4-10, has the best odds. That’s pretty unfair, especially considering the fact that the three worst teams will have tried and failed to get into the middle range. That means they will be actually bad instead of just tanking, and they won’t be able to get better.
That’s awful. It’s not the only bad part, though. What’s perhaps getting overlooked is the fact that teams won’t be able to get top-five picks three years in a row, no matter how bad they are. That’s also unfortunate. It means the Utah Jazz, for example, cannot pick in the top five next year. They’re the only team that has that distinction, fortunately.
But moving forward, the NBA has made it so that no team can repeat the Spurs’ success. They’re about to become a dynasty, and teams literally cannot do what they just did. It’s already unfair, and now it just further accentuates the gap between the top and the bottom.
Not to mention, the Spurs were already a dynasty in the early 2000s and 2010s. Now, they’re going to dominate the 2020s and 2030s, and the NBA made it so it’s going to be ridiculously hard to challenge them. It’s hard to ignore the fact that San Antonio sure looks like the golden child right now, and that can’t change until 2029, when the system can be revisited.
