Spurs vs Knicks Game 1 sets the tone for which roster construction will take center stage

The Knicks and Spurs built contenders from different blueprints; tonight the NBA starts deciding which one was right.

For the entirety of the Golden Empire, every front office in basketball has been chasing the same ghost. Steph Curry and the Warriors broke the sport and ever since, everyone has been trying to figure out how to build the next dynasty. Tonight, two franchises tip off the NBA Finals with completely different answers. By the end of June, one of those answers gets a parade.

This is the latest referendum on how you build a champion.

One team collected every player the league left on the shelf and assembled something beautiful. The other spent years losing hella basketball games until a seven-foot-four basketball alien fell out of the sky and into their lap for them to build a solar system around him. One bet on finding players everyone else underestimated. The other bet on finding a player nobody could miss.

The Spurs meanwhile are the franchise everyone points to when they defend losing for lottery odds, because Tim Duncan already worked once. San Antonio has been here before. They know exactly what it looks like when a generational big man in silver and black starts stacking championships. They drafted Wembanyama first, Dylan Harper second, Stephon Castle fourth, Devin Vassell 11th, and arrived at the Finals with a core so young their stars are still on rookie deals.

Brunson was not supposed to be this. Dallas let him walk because they did not think he was this. Half the league looked at a 6-foot-2 guard and saw a ceiling. The Knicks looked at the same player and saw a franchise. If he wins a title, every scouting department in basketball is going to spend the next decade asking how they missed it, because the guard deemed too small to carry Dallas will have carried New York to its first championship since 1973. That’s a heckuva redemption arc. The Knicks built an entire Finals roster out of players somebody else looked at and said, “nah, we’re good.”

If New York wins, a lot of executives are going to have to stare at their own mistakes. The Knicks did not discover hidden stars as most of these players were sitting in plain sight. New York simply identified them correctly when everyone else identified them wrong.

The Spurs can become proof that tanking does not just work, it works fast! It works spectacularly and it works so well that a franchise can go from drafting first overall to holding a parade before the rookie contract is half over. If Wemby does it, the conversation about his ceiling does not continue. The ceiling collapses and gets replaced with something that has no name yet.

And here is the layer that does not get discussed enough. A Spurs championship would validate patience with youth. Every front office currently investing in a 20-year-old wondering if they need to trade him for veteran insurance is watching Mitch Johnson coach Harper and Castle through the biggest stage in the sport and doing the math differently now.

By the end of June, one of these two theories will have a championship attached to it. The rest of the league will spend the summer pretending they believed in it all along.