5 Reasons landing Wembanyama ensures Spurs aren’t leaving San Antonio anytime soon

4. Increasing media attention

The earlier tweet from Mike Finger applies here as well— Wembanyama landing in San Antonio means the national media will return to the Texas hill country. As soon as the Kawhi Leonard drama came to a close and the Klaw headed to Toronto, the attention of most basketball talking heads left San Antonio, and it hasn’t returned since.  

As Matthew notes in his tweet, the Spurs media room went from mostly an afterthought to the place to be overnight. The Silver and Black will be a whole lot closer to the center of basketball coverage than they have since 2017. That will come with pros and cons (especially if the team is slow out of the gates) but selfishly, it’s cool that NBA-related podcasts and articles will be about the Spurs again.

5. Hope

It’s impossible to speak about how not fun the last five-ish years of Spurs basketball have been without recognizing the privilege that comes with being a fan of one of the premier organizations in basketball (just in the last 40 years the team has won the lottery three times—all three during which there was an “all-time” prospect—and won five titles).

But the last few years have been… yeah. There was the aforementioned Kawhi situation, followed by several mediocre seasons in a row, and most recently, the release of Josh Primo (which resulted in the Spurs now owning the biggest waste of a lottery pick of all time).

Listen. There are a million reasons (or 500 million, if you’re a member of the Holt family) to celebrate your favorite team drafting Victor Wembanyama. One of them should absolutely be the fact that a historic small-market city gets to keep its beloved franchise in the 2-1-0.