In his 2018 book, The Mamba Mentality, the late NBA legend Kobe Bryant wrote, “The agony of defeat is as low as the joy of winning is high.”
It’s a lesson the San Antonio Spurs had to learn after falling to the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals this past summer.
Even after exceeding expectations, losing still stings. Sometimes, that pain fades with time. Other times, it lingers — a reminder of how much more there is left to accomplish.
“The losing is … going to stick with all of us for a pretty long time,” forward Julian Champagnie said Monday during Spurs Media Day at the Victory Capital Performance Center. “[But] I think it’s going to give us the drive we’re looking for — that extra step to get over the hump.”
If the Spurs want to get back to the NBA Finals, the obstacles may be even greater this season. After an unexpected run to the Western Conference championship last year, the team will start this season with a target on its back. It might be a bigger challenge, but a position atop the West isn’t something the players have any interest in giving up.
“We won the West last year, [so] we don’t want to do anything less this year,” star center Victor Wembanyama said. “We want to be the first seed. We want to keep fighting for the top spot.”
Spurs history offers a compelling precedent for turning Finals heartbreak into motivation. The Silver and Black did exactly that in the 2013-14 season when the team defeated the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals to claim the franchise’s fifth championship. That happened one year after losing to the Heat in the Finals.
Champagnie doesn’t see any reason why it couldn’t happen again.
“We made it to the place we wanted to with an opportunity to win,” he said. “I feel like we have an opportunity to do the same thing over again and go back and control the controllables. I feel like that’s where our destiny is going to lie.”
As guard Stephon Castle put it, a loss in the NBA Finals isn’t easy to brush off, but over time it fades away.
“It’s something that you have to live with,” Castle said. “I don’t think I’m going to ever erase it out of my mind. But being able to use it as fuel and motivation is probably the stage that we’re at now.”
Forward Harrison Barnes knows the feeling all too well.
In addition to last season’s loss with the Spurs, Barnes experienced defeat in the 2016 Finals as a member of the Golden State Warriors. Anytime a player gets that close to a championship and comes up short, it creates motivation to reach the pinnacle again.
“I had that experience 10 years ago, and I had that experience last season, [and] I think both feel the exact same way,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how you show up every single day remembering that feeling.”
Guard Dylan Harper remembers the feeling. Indeed, he said that after the Finals, he doesn’t even like flying back home to the East Coast. Harper grew up roughly half an hour from Madison Square Garden.
“You gotta fly into the same airport that we flew into in [the Finals],” he said. “[The loss] is definitely still with me. It’s probably going to be with me forever. [But] I’ll use it as fuel to the fire for the whole year and for years to come.”
The loss to the Knicks has given Wembanyama restless nights over the past few months, but he’s looking forward to using the stinging defeat to his advantage.
“I’ve had nights where it’s … haunting sometimes,” he said. “There’s a point where you accept that you have to go through it and you have to feel all of it. I couldn’t imagine better motivation.”
San Antonio Spurs preseason games for the 2026-27 season begin Thursday, Oct. 8, at home against the Atlanta Hawks. The regular season starts Tuesday, Oct. 20, at home against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
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