Chet Holmgren did not just lose Game 7. He looked like a guy who knew he had been beaten before he even sat down at the podium.
The Thunder fell 111-103 to the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals on Saturday at Paycom Center, ending their title defense in the most painful way possible. After the game, a reporter asked Holmgren about Victor Wembanyama getting inside his head over seven games. The answer told you everything.
“At the end of the day, it’s always about us trying to win the basketball game,” Holmgren said. “Us as a collective, the Thunder team trying to win the basketball game. That’s what it’s always going to be.”
Translation: he did not want to talk about Wemby.
You cannot really blame him. Wembanyama dropped 22 points and grabbed 7 rebounds in the closeout game while Holmgren finished with 4 points and 4 rebounds on 1-of-2 shooting. The Thunder star even got benched during a critical stretch of the fourth quarter. For a defending champion’s frontcourt anchor, that is a brutal way to bow out.
The optics of this series matter for the future of the Western Conference. Holmgren is supposed to be the guy who keeps Oklahoma City a year-after-year contender. Wemby just made him look small, both on the floor and at the microphone. The poster dunk in Game 7 will get replayed for years.
This is not the first time Wembanyama has owned Holmgren either. The two have history going back to last season’s regular season meetings, where Wemby has consistently won the matchup. Now he has done it in the playoffs with everything on the line.
What hurts the most for Thunder fans is that this is supposed to be the start of a dynasty, not the end of one. Oklahoma City had home-court advantage. Oklahoma City was healthier. Oklahoma City is the team everyone picked. And yet here we are, with Holmgren looking like a player searching for words that do not exist while Wembanyama and the Spurs board a plane to face the Knicks.
Holmgren is only 24. He has plenty of time to flip this script. But the next time someone asks him about Wemby, he is going to need a better answer than the one he gave Saturday night. Because rivals do not get to dodge the question. And in the NBA right now, this is a rivalry whether Holmgren likes it or not.
Oklahoma City has a long offseason to figure out what to do about it. The roster is talented enough to get right back here. But until somebody figures out how to slow down Wemby, the Thunder are going to keep running into the same wall. And that wall has a 7-foot-3 wingspan and a French accent.
The bigger question heading into next year is whether Sam Presti tries to add another big who can switch onto Wemby or whether he doubles down on the current core and trusts Holmgren to figure it out. Saturday night did not give Thunder fans a lot of reason to be patient.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
