They call it the most famous headache in baseball history. In 1925, New York Yankees’ first baseman Wally Pipp asked for a day off to deal with a headache. Yankees manager Miller Huggins responded by starting the young Lou Gehrig in Pipp’s place. Gehrig wouldn’t surrender his post at first base for 14 years across a Hall of Fame career.
The parallels between those Yankees a century ago and the San Antonio Spurs today are getting harder to ignore. Just substitute a sprained ankle for a headache and you’re nearly there.
A bit more than a year ago, De’Aaron Fox demanded a trade from the Sacramento Kings with one destination in mind: San Antonio. The Spurs, not knowing what the next few months had in store, eagerly obliged. Fox’s preference lowered the trade price substantially. The Spurs gave up a modest return of draft picks, kept their other key young guard in Stephon Castle and figured they had their backcourt for the foreseeable future.
And then Victor Wembanyama got a blood clot. He missed the rest of the season. The Spurs went in the tank. They jumped from No. 8 to No. 2 in the NBA Draft lottery. In comes Dylan Harper, and Pipp Watch begins.
The Spurs developed Harper slowly at first. He was a 20-minute backup for most of the season, but averaged nearly 19 points and six assists per 36 minutes. When the playoffs arrived, it got harder and harder to keep him off the floor. He was the one who led San Antonio to a crucial, Wembanyama-less road win in Portland in the first round with 27 points on nine-of-12 shooting. He shot nearly 57% in the second against Minnesota. And then Fox sprained his ankle.
If we’re sticking with the 1920s Yankee analogies here, Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals will primarily be remembered as the night Wembanyama became something akin to Babe Ruth: a game-breaking, almost mythological figure who shatters most of our preconceived notions about what is even possible in this sport.
But right by Ruth’s side was our impending Gehrig. Harper was outstanding: 24 points, 11 rebounds, seven steals and six assists. The Spurs were +14 in his minutes, second on the team behind only Wembanyama’s +16. Basketball Reference charts a statistic called “game score,” which was created by John Hollinger to boil down a player’s overall production in a single game into a single number. Fox’s playoff high, from Game 4 of the Portland series, was 25.8. Harper, perhaps fittingly, eked past him at 25.9 in Game 1 against the Thunder.
The performance underlines what has become apparent throughout this postseason: Dylan Harper is ready to start. San Antonio, organizationally, pays less attention to things like lineup hierarchies than almost any other team. Manu Ginobili spent the majority of his Hall of Fame career coming off the bench, after all. Ginobili is the upper limit on how good a player can be while willingly coming off the bench. Harper is headed somewhere more substantial.
By game score, this was the 14th-best playoff game a rookie guard has ever played. The top three all belong to Magic Johnson, so we’re starting out in good company. Most of the others have some meaningful caveat. Six of the next seven came in the first round, and the one that didn’t, Tyler Herro’s Game 4 of the 2020 Eastern Conference Finals, came in the Orlando bubble. The No. 11 slot was the best game of Daniel Gibson’s career, his out-of-nowhere closeout of the 2007 Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals. The next two came in losses.
And then we have Harper, whose monster performance came on the road against one of the greatest defenses of all time in the conference finals… and technically wasn’t even his best game of the playoffs. That Game 3 win in Portland came with a 27.2 game score. Three players occupy half of the top 20. Magic Johnson appears four times. Michael Jordan appears thrice. And the last three spots all belong to Harper.
Harper is not Manu Ginobili. The Spurs are not going to be able to keep him on the bench much longer. He’s headed for superstardom. Where exactly that leaves Fox is the under-the-radar, big-picture story of this Spurs run.
Could Harper and Fox start together? You’re not taking Stephon Castle out of the starting five. He’s a future star in his own right, and he’s one of the NBA’s best perimeter defenders. The Spurs tried the three of them together for only 54 possessions this season, and they went poorly. None of them, at least as of yet, are high-level 3-point shooters, and they’re somewhat duplicative offensively as drivers who need the ball. Playing the three of them together generates diminishing returns.
Besides, San Antonio’s season took off when Mitch Johnson officially handed Harrison Barnes‘ starting role to Julian Champagnie, a superior shooter. San Antonio went 21-3 with Castle, Fox, Wembanyama, Champagnie and Devin Vassell starting. The formula here is pretty straightforward: Wembanyama, two shooters, two attacking guards.
If Harper isn’t better than Fox today, he soon will be. Fox was an All-Star this season, but he’s 28 and the signs of decline were already evident. Players who make their name with speed tend not to age especially gracefully. Fox averaged almost 16 drives and over 12 points in the paint per game at his Sacramento peak. He was down to about 12 drives and nine points in the paint this season, and his shooting percentages near the rim were down as well. The standard here is high. He was the fastest player in the NBA at his best. That’s no longer the case. He’s become a good enough mid-range scorer that he can survive some gradual physical decline, but without a reliable 3-pointer, playing off the ball is less than ideal.
Maybe Fox is the next Ginobili here. If he’s willing to go to the bench long-term, well, that could make matters easier. If the goal was winning above all else, as his push to get to San Antonio suggests, maybe that’s on the table. That said, it’s exceedingly rare for a player of Fox’s stature to do so. Ginobilis are the exception, not the rule. There are tricky politics here. Fox and his agent, the enormously influential Rich Paul, did the Spurs a favor by steering his trade process in their direction. That allowed them to trade for him at a discount. Dislodging him from the core in any meaningful way comes with potential ramifications here. How eager would Klutch be to do you any more favors after that?
The Spurs could argue they paid that discount back contractually. Even after landing Harper in the lottery, San Antonio last offseason gave Fox a max contract extension that hasn’t even kicked in yet. It’s hard to imagine him getting the max on the open market today, given the restrictions imposed by the 2023 CBA. That contract isn’t much of an impediment now. It becomes one in a few years, when Wembanyama, Castle and Harper eventually start earning market-rate salaries. When Fox was the point guard of the future, even an overpay was justifiable. Now that Harper is claiming that job, it would be naive to assume the Spurs won’t at least consider a trade. He’s a luxury to them, at least in the long term. He’d still be a point guard upgrade for most of the league.
That’s an offseason matter. More pertinent, for the moment, is winning three more games against Oklahoma City and then four against the Eastern Conference champion. Most champions don’t bench All-Stars in the conference finals. Harper may be ready for the starting role, but that probably doesn’t mean he’s going to get it quite yet.
There’s a “don’t rock the boat” component to the decision Mitch Johnson has to make. The Spurs are winning this series and have thrived with Fox all season. Either the Thunder or the Eastern Conference champion probably has to seriously stress the Spurs before they consider this extreme. They’re not there yet.
But there are basketball concerns, especially in this specific matchup, that probably make him a short-term necessity even if he is a long-term luxury. Fox, stylistically, is probably San Antonio’s key to dictating the terms of engagement in this series.
For the Spurs, this is a half-court series. For the Thunder, it’s a transition series. These teams have now played six times this season, and the Thunder have been held below one point per play in the half-court in four of those games. Their half-court offense is built around the rim-pressure Shai Gilgeous-Alexander generates against every team in the NBA except Wembanyama’s. Oklahoma City’s path to victory, therefore, is to dominate the possession game. They need to generate turnovers and outscore the Spurs on the break. In Game 1, Oklahoma City outscored San Antonio by nine in fast-break points and 11 off turnovers. They lost the game, but they got that part of the formula right.
The Spurs turned the ball over 21 times. More than half of those turnovers (11) were committed by Castle. His primary role in this series is defending Gilgeous-Alexander. Asking him to carry too big a ball-handling burden overtaxes him, and as well as Harper’s playing, he’s still a rookie, and asking a rookie to be a primary ball-handler for seven games against a defense this good is pretty precarious.
Fox’s steadiness as a ball-handler and playmaker is going to be important in this series, even if the Spurs survived without it in Game 1. Games like this might eventually become Harper’s norm. He’s probably not doing that every night in this series. What often gets lost in the Gehrig-Pipp lore is that even though Gehrig officially replaced Pipp in 1925, he debuted with the team two years earlier in 1923. Even Lou Gehrig had to wait his turn. We may all know where this is going next season, but Harper will probably have to wait as well.
