NBA Playoffs 2026: Is playoff experience now a playoff tax? Why Wemby and the Spurs can win it all

For a guy who is the tallest player in the NBA, Victor Wembanyama doesn’t seem to care much about ceilings.

Many doubted Wemby and the San Antonio Spurs’ legitimacy before the season. Vegas projections gave them just the 17th-best odds to win the championship and an over/under win total of 44.5. With Wembanyama leading the way with an impressive MVP case, they smashed that figure with 20 games remaining in the schedule. The team finished at 62-20, the second-best record in the NBA.

They’re way ahead of schedule, and it’s clear they’re setting their sights higher:

They want a championship.

(Joseph Raines/Yahoo Sports Illustration)

Despite the Spurs outpacing their win projection by more than any other team in the league, the oddsmakers still aren’t totally sold on their title makeup. According to BetMGM data, the team is +450 to win the NBA title, giving them implied odds of 18%, which is worlds better than the preseason prognostication, but still not a gushing review. They remain a distant second behind the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder, who currently show implied odds of 44%, more than double the Spurs’ figure.

A confidence gap that large, one would assume the Thunder have dominated the Spurs this season, but the complete opposite has happened. The Spurs have soundly overwhelmed Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s club, winning four of the five matchups this season, with three of those San Antonio victories coming by double-digits.

So what’s holding the Spurs back from a rosier outlook? Ah, playoff experience.

Speaking to ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt after a 40-point performance earlier this month, Wembanyama wasn’t on board with the idea that the Spurs’ inexperience will hurt them.

“We don’t have experience, right?” Wembanyama said. “Screw it.”

The 22-year-old is on to something. In an injury-riddled NBA where young teams are flourishing in an increasingly uptempo playoff environment, the Spurs are closer to a championship than it appears. In today’s NBA, the most-experienced playoff teams seem to be the ones getting screwed in the postseason. And the Spurs can use that to their advantage.

After LeBron James and Stephen Curry dominated the NBA Finals for nearly a decade, the league has seen a revolving door at the top. The league has crowned a new champion in each of the last seven years, the longest stretch of championship parity the league has ever seen.

Why can’t Wemby’s Spurs be the next in line?

The Spurs’ youth: A bug or feature?

Many point to the Spurs’ inexperience as the thing that will lead to their eventual downfall. This will be the NBA playoff debut for Wembanyama, a moment the basketball world has been waiting for with anticipation. At times, there will be Spurs lineups where the entire five-man group will have never played in the NBA playoffs before. Dylan Harper, Stephon Castle, Keldon Johnson, Devin Vassell and Julian Champagnie have never stepped foot in a playoff atmosphere in this league.

They do have some vets. Currently, the Spurs have a minutes-weighted average age of 25.4 years old, which is a tad “older” than the current Thunder roster, which checks in at 25.2 this season, per Basketball Reference. De’Aaron Fox, at 28 years old, has been in the playoffs once before with the Sacramento Kings, but that lasted only one series. The 33-year-old Harrison Barnes is the Spurs’ version of Alex Caruso, having won the 2015 championship with the Golden State Warriors and adding multiple postseason runs to his resume. If not Barnes, the Spurs have Luke Kornet, the backup center who won a championship ring with the 2022 Boston Celtics.

There’s no sugarcoating it, though. This Spurs team will be one of the least experienced clubs in the playoff field. According to Yahoo Sports research, the Spurs collectively have only 5,615 minutes of playoff experience, which is fourth-lowest among the 20 postseason teams, with only the Charlotte Hornets, Orlando Magic and Toronto Raptors clocking in with less playoff playing time. In fact, the Spurs have less than half as many playoff minutes on their resume as the postseason average (11,356).

As for Finals experience, the Spurs have just three players who have reached that level of the postseason, which is even fewer than the youthful Hornets. And let’s just say that those three players — Barnes, Kornet and Kelly Olynyk — weren’t exactly in the Finals MVP conversations.

But here’s the twist. The team’s youth can no longer be considered a barrier to the Larry O’Brien trophy. If anything, head coach Mitch Johnson and the team should be empowered by what they saw last June.

The 2025 NBA Finals was a matchup marked by relative inexperience. Gilgeous-Alexander, the Finals MVP,  had never been in the NBA Finals and neither had the best player on the other team, Tyrese Haliburton. For the Thunder, the only player with Finals experience last season was Caruso.

As for their age, the Thunder made history by becoming the first Gen Z champion, led by a fleet of players who weren’t alive for the Bulls’ Jordan era. With an average age of 25.6 years old, they became the youngest NBA champion since the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers led by Bill Walton. Almost exactly the same age as this year’s Spurs.

The Spurs can take note that youth was on OKC’s side, just as it was with the Pacers, who outran their Eastern Conference opponents to the tune of 98.5 possessions per game, the fastest of any East squad. The Thunder ramped it up even more. Built on blazing speed and disruptive length, Thunder defenders covered 8.8 miles of ground per game last postseason, the most for any champion in the player-tracking era, according to NBA advanced camera data.

That should play into the Spurs’ favor as they are indeed led by players who are wet behind the ears.

The NBA’s uptempo playing style raises a philosophical question: Is youthful inexperience a bug or a feature? The way the NBA is trending, the answer isn’t so clear.

Is there a postseason tax?

Finals teams are increasingly getting younger and the game is getting faster. Warriors head coach and future Hall of Famer Steve Kerr told me last postseason that injuries are taking their toll and it’s becoming more of a young man’s game.

“Who’s more likely to be able to withstand the rigors of the pace and space and the game-every-other-day schedule — the younger players or the older players?” Kerr said. “The younger guys are.”

At some point, experience becomes a tax. As chronicled at Yahoo Sports, Jayson Tatum’s Achilles’ tendon snapped last postseason after logging more minutes than any player since 2017-18. He was one of the most “experienced” players in the NBA and it may have caught up to him. Tatum was one of five players in the 2025 All-Star Game that missed at least one game due to injury in the playoffs, which would have been an extreme high in the 1990s but has lately become the norm. Consider that in a five-year span from 1994-2000 (there was no All-Star game in 1999), there were four injured All-Stars combined in the playoffs, which is fewer than we witnessed in last year’s postseason — or any of the postseasons since 2018.

And that’s not counting Haliburton, who technically didn’t miss a game with his Achilles tear in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, but otherwise couldn’t play in the biggest moments of his career. Damian Lillard, playing in his 10th playoff run, also tore his Achilles against Indiana in the first round, ending his tenure with Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks earlier than expected.

All of these star injuries create variance in the playoffs and open up the playing field to more title contenders. This isn’t to say that the four-seeded Pacers wouldn’t have sniffed the Finals if their path wasn’t paved with injury-riddled opponents. But it’s certainly a factor when considering their remarkable Cinderella run to the Finals. With Evan Mobley, Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell hobbled last season, the Cleveland Cavaliers were missing star players in the conference semifinals against Indiana and the Pacers promptly ran them off the floor.

Many expected the Celtics and Cavs to face off in the Eastern Conference finals and neither of them made it there in part because of injuries to their star players. Would things have been different if the stars were healthy? We’ll never know, and frankly, Pacers fans shouldn’t have to answer for it when they look up at the 2024-25 Eastern Conference championship banner.

But going forward, the injury variable is one that likely will continue to scramble the championship calculus.

There is a notion that teams have to have a playoff run under their belt before they can be taken seriously. Last year’s Thunder seem to be classic examples of this “you have to walk before you can run” concept, having been ousted in the Western Conference semifinals by the Dallas Mavericks in 2024 before going all the way last year. While that’s true, the Wemby Spurs actually have more playoff minutes under their belt than last year’s OKC team, which ranked second-fewest in the playoff field.

The tide might be turning and we might be due for a Wemby run to the title. In fact, after the first round in the 2025 postseason, the lesser-experienced team went a perfect 7-0 in series matchups, including the NBA Finals when OKC topped the Pacers. All that so-called experience didn’t cash in for greybearded teams like Golden State, the Lakers and the Clippers, who were all first-round outs. While we’re here, let’s think about it. Are the extraordinary miles on the tires of the Warriors, Lakers and Clippers’ rosters considered a virtue or a burden? It can’t be both. In today’s NBA, the Spurs’ relative inexperience could just as well be seen as “fresh legs” that benefited the Thunder and Pacers last year.

There’s always a chance the Spurs are the ones who get hit with the injury bug. After all, Wembanyama barely made the 65-game cut for the big awards and Fox missed a chunk of the season with a hamstring injury. The health questions may already be hitting on some level with Harper leaving the season finale early tending to a thumb injury and Wembanyama missing late-season games with a rib contusion.

But the Spurs have broken the mold this season and seem poised to break through some more. The outcomes of recent NBA Finals is a cemetery of closely cherished maxims. Teams can’t win the title with the 3-ball … until Steph happened. Cleveland is cursed … until LeBron came home. A 35-year-old coach can’t get Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum over the hump … until Joe Mazzulla did. The Thunder are too young … until last year happened. You get the idea.

One might think a 22-year-old can’t win it all in his first go-around in the NBA playoffs. But the new injury-riddled NBA demands us to expect the unexpected. If you put a ceiling on Wemby, he might just say screw it and break through that, too.