‘Spurs Are Gonna Win the West,’ P.J. Tucker Chooses San Antonio Over Oklahoma City Thunders

A few days after announcing his retirement from a 14-season NBA career, P.J. Tucker made the most consequential prediction of his nascent media life. The San Antonio Spurs, he said, are going to win the Western Conference. Not the Oklahoma City Thunder, the reigning champions, the No. 1 seed, the team that just swept the Los Angeles Lakers out of the second round without breaking a detectable sweat. The Spurs.

And as Tucker aired his prediction Tuesday, San Antonio held a 3-2 series lead over Minnesota with two chances to close it out and book the Western Conference Finals showdown he’s already forecasting. The argument has more architecture than most bold predictions do. The Oklahoma City Thunder are listed as heavy favorites to win the Western Conference Finals whenever their opponent is determined.

The Thunder finished the regular season with an NBA-best 64-18 record and plus-11.1 point differential, and they have looked every bit that dominant through two rounds of the postseason. The Thunder swept the Suns in the first round, then swept the Lakers in the second round, becoming the first defending champions to sweep their first two series since LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers in 2017.

The Spurs are one win away from the Western Conference Finals, with Game 6 scheduled for Friday in Minneapolis. If they close it out, Tucker’s bold prediction gets a real test. However, the most serious counterargument to Tucker runs through Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. In the regular season, SGA averaged 31.1 points on 55.3% shooting, with 6.6 assists and 4.3 rebounds in 68 games, numbers that made him a finalist for back-to-back MVP awards.

In the postseason, he has been even more imposing. When the Lakers pushed the Thunder in Game 4 of their second-round series, Gilgeous-Alexander scored nine of his series-high 35 points in the fourth quarter to close out a sweep.

1. Victor Wembanyama, The “Matchup Nightmare”

P.J. Tucker, appearing on ESPN’s Get Up said, “I think the Spurs are gonna win the West.” Most of the Spurs 4-1 wins against the Thunder throughout the regular season came with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander not at full strength. That caveat matters. Tucker is not arguing the Spurs discovered a repeatable formula for stopping an SGA at full throttle. He is arguing that the team’s length, pace, and defensive versatility present a different problem for Oklahoma City than the Lakers or Suns did.

2. NBA Champion P.J. Tucker’s “Experiential” Prediction Can Beat Out Every Media Analyst

41-year-old P.J. Tucker spent 14 seasons in the NBA as one of the league’s best rugged role players. The 6-foot-5 forward regularly played as a small-ball center, did the defensive dirty work, and won a championship as a starting forward with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021. He played for eight franchises across his career, survived multiple playoff runs, and developed a reputation for knowing, more than most, what specifically breaks teams down in high-stakes series. His retirement announcement on May 7, six days before the Get Up appearance, was framed as an ending and a beginning simultaneously: “20 years being my job but 40 plus years of not being able to fathom doing anything other than it. So here’s to retiring from the NBA… because I will NEVER stop ballin.” He enters the media ecosystem as a freshly credentialed voice, the kind of player-turned-pundit whose opinions are sharpened by direct experience with the specific pressures of what he’s predicting. The championship context matters for his Spurs take in particular. Tucker’s 2021 Bucks run was built on defensive versatility and the ability to deploy switchable, wing-heavy lineups against bigger, more celebrated opponents. In the conference finals that year, Milwaukee neutralized Kevin Durant with Tucker as the primary assignment in stretches, a task the rest of the basketball world considered impossible. The Spurs’ defensive profile has a similar philosophical shape; length, switching, deterrence at the rim from Wembanyama, and the positional size of Stephon Castle and De’Aaron Fox in the backcourt. What Tucker brings to the conversation that most media analysts cannot match is physical memory of what it felt like to be on the court against teams that had a dominant two-way big. He knows the fatigue calculus, the floor spacing adjustments, and the psychological weight of watching an opponent protect the rim on one end and dismantle your defense on the other. His prediction seems experiential.

3. The 28-Game Turnaround: How Wembanyama, Fox, and Coach Johnson Built a Title Contender

The Spurs improved by 28 games over last season’s win total, the third-biggest single-season turnaround in franchise history. That number is the product of a summer roster construction that added De’Aaron Fox via trade extension and Dylan Harper with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2025 draft, and a full season of Wembanyama healthy enough to play 64 games after a deep vein thrombosis diagnosis cut his 2024-25 campaign short. Wembanyama averaged 25.0 points per game in the regular season and led the league in blocks for the third consecutive year, a distinction previously held only by Marcus Camby and Dikembe Mutombo. The combined scoring average of Wembanyama (25.0), Fox (18.6), and Castle (16.7) made them one of seven teams in the NBA with three players in the top 50 in scoring, alongside Boston, Cleveland, New York, Houston, Toronto, and Charlotte. The Spurs went 30-4 in their last 34 regular-season games, a stretch that made the question not whether they were a real playoff team, but how high their ceiling was. In the first round, San Antonio made short work of the Portland Trail Blazers, and in the second round, the Spurs controlled the series against a Timberwolves team that pushed the Thunder to six games last season. Stephon Castle became just the eighth player in NBA history to record 15 points, five rebounds, and five assists in each of his first three career playoff games, joining Oscar Robertson, Bob Dandridge, Pete Maravich, Mitch Richmond, Steve Francis, Damian Lillard, and one other in a list that speaks to what Castle is becoming. Head coach Mitch Johnson, 36 years old and in his first full season running the show, inherited the Gregg Popovich blueprint and has navigated the second round without panic, including the stretch in which his best player was ejected in a close game and the series had to be steadied. The “Locked In” tifo that unfurled at Frost Bank Center before Game 5 was a visual statement about an organization that has found its identity.

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