Wembanyama's "overthinking" shouldn't be happening in year 4 after an NBA Finals run

“I need to go back to playing the basketball I like."
"This is not the sport I like right here."
"I’m good when I have fun."
"I wasn’t decisive. I might be overthinking it. I don’t need to do more. I need to think less, probably.”

I can't stop thinking about these quotes from Victor Wembanyama after the loss to OKC when the next face of the league went 1/13 from the field. He's started this season with hefty expectations, but that's always been the case and he's always lived up.

But the Spurs took what was working last year and changed it, and now he has to consider whether he needs to reinvent himself already to make an unorthodox strategy work. He shouldn't have to do that.

The Spurs weren't a team that needed saving

Phil Jackson once talked about taking over the Bulls and telling Michael Jordan that he didn't need the Bulls legend to score 37 points a game. He changed the MJ's approach to help get a team over the hump that wasn't really coming close to winning prior to his arrival. That's not the situation the Spurs are living in.

San Antonio just won 62 games and went to the NBA Finals in a season where most didn't expect them to make the playoffs without at least going through the play-in tournament. What they were doing was working. When teams get that close and bring back their entire rotation, they usually just run it back, maybe with a few tweaks to their scheme.

Inserting Dylan Harper into the starting lineup is a large tweak, and even though the lineup itself worked, as SI's Tom Petrini points out, it requires moving many more parts than you should have to after having the level of success you just had.

Everything in San Antonio falls in line behind Wemby

Longtime NBA writer Ric Bucher recently said, "Putting the emphasis on what's best for the team is best for every individual, not the other way around, is what fueled their success back then."

There's truth to that statement. Manu Ginobili didn't want to come off the bench in the beginning. He did it because he trusted Coach Popovich. Stephen Jackson once believed he should be getting more minutes than Manu, and Captain Jack found himself off the team because no man was supposed to put himself over the many.

Players are assigned roles that they need to accept until a change is necessary. If and when that time comes, be ready to take advantage of your opportunity. But this thing revolves around Wembanyama, and making sure he's comfortable and confident first should be the number one priority. Everything and everybody else falls into line behind that idea, and you move as a unit.

It's odd for a superstar coming off such a monstrous run to enter his fourth season as the MVP favorite and talk about not liking the sport, being indecisive, and thinking too much in his first game of the year. He should be more comfortable than ever at this point because the team makes it so.

I don't believe Wemby is trying to signal that he wants to scrap the three-guard system. He'll keep trying to adjust to what's going on around him. But he shouldn't be the one trying to figure it out. The Spurs need to make his life easier. Not harder.

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