Wembanyama's all-around night lifts Spurs past Suns in preseason finale

Victor Wembanyama scored 19 points on 9-of-14 shooting and added four rebounds, three assists, three steals and two blocks as the San Antonio Spurs beat the Phoenix Suns 123-103 on Wednesday night at Frost Bank Center, snapping a three-game preseason losing streak six days before a season-opening rematch with the team San Antonio eliminated from last spring's playoffs.

The win, in the Spurs' next-to-last preseason game, marked one of the first times this fall that San Antonio's full projected starting five — Wembanyama, De'Aaron Fox, Devin Vassell, Stephon Castle and second-year guard Dylan Harper — played a complete game together. Wembanyama finished a plus-19 in 23 minutes, according to the official box score. Stephon Castle added 18 points on an unusual line — 2 of 5 from the field but 14 of 15 from the free-throw line — while Fox had 9 points and 4 assists, Vassell scored 12 and Harper added 9. Phoenix, playing without several regulars, was led by Jamaree Bouyea's 15 points and 8 assists.

A rocky preseason finds its footing

The win follows a bumpy exhibition slate for San Antonio. The Spurs lost to the Atlanta Hawks 116-123 on Oct. 8 after blowing a 23-point lead, then lost to Phoenix 98-102 two days later, then were blown out 109-119 at Utah on Oct. 12 with Wembanyama and several starters rested. After the second loss to Phoenix, head coach Mitch Johnson was blunt about his team's readiness. "Tonight would not be up to the standard that we want, and we just have to make sure we take advantage of the opportunities," he said, adding that the team needed to "play to the identity and style of play into the fundamentals that we are fully aware of that we're supposed to."

"We play opening night in 10 days, and tonight would not feel like we would be ready to go."

Johnson's assessment, delivered three days before Wednesday's win, captured the stakes of a preseason that had offered few signs the roster was gelling. Wednesday's performance, with the starting five finally playing together for a full game, was the clearest answer yet to that concern, though neither Johnson nor Wembanyama had commented publicly on the win as of Thursday.

Building on a Finals run

The Spurs enter this season on the back of their deepest playoff run in more than a decade. San Antonio beat Oklahoma City 111-103 in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals on the road on May 30, reaching the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014, with Wembanyama named unanimous Western Conference finals MVP after averaging 27.3 points and 10.9 rebounds across the series, including a 41-point outing in Game 1. San Antonio then lost the Finals 4-1 to the New York Knicks, with Jalen Brunson winning Finals MVP, in a series that ran June 3-13.

That run came after a lost 2025 season for Wembanyama, who was diagnosed with deep-vein thrombosis in his shoulder in February 2025, a condition that ended his year early. His full recovery and the deepest postseason run of his career the following spring is the backdrop against which this preseason's shaky start, and Wednesday's response to it, is being read inside the organization: at 22, with a Western Conference finals MVP already on his résumé, Wembanyama is the player San Antonio's championship timeline is built around, and how he and the rest of the young core — Castle at 21 and Harper, the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft, in just his second NBA season — perform together over a full 82 games is this year's central storyline for the franchise.

Six days to the rematch

San Antonio has one preseason game left, against Sacramento on Oct. 17, before opening the regular season at home against Oklahoma City on Oct. 20 — a nationally televised rematch, on NBC and Peacock, of the Game 7 that sent the Spurs to the Finals. The matchup gives both the Spurs and the Thunder an early measuring stick against the team that ended their season a year ago, and will be the first real test of whether San Antonio's young core can pick up where last spring's run left off. The league's own season preview of the Spurs frames the opener as one of the marquee matchups of the first week, alongside Boston-Detroit and Philadelphia-New York on an opening night the league has built around its biggest storylines from last spring's playoffs.

For now, Wednesday's win is a single preseason data point rather than a verdict, and the Spurs themselves have treated it that way, with no victory-lap statements from the locker room. But after a stretch in which the team's coach openly questioned whether it would be ready for opening night, a complete performance from its full starting lineup, anchored by the player it is building around, was the one result this preseason that the organization needed before the games start counting.

Phoenix, for its part, used Wednesday's game largely to evaluate depth pieces with several regulars held out, and the final score is unlikely to carry much predictive weight for either team once the regular season begins. What it did confirm is that San Antonio's starting five, when healthy and on the floor together, is still capable of the kind of two-way performance that carried it to a Game 7 road win in Oklahoma City last May — exactly the form the Spurs will need again in six days when the same opponent comes to Frost Bank Center for real.