2025-26 Postmortem: The Ceiling · Part 3
How The Spurs Solved Anthony Edwards
After Game 1 there was hope. By halftime of Game 2 the series was over. Inside the defense that turned the league's best young star into the wrong kind of shot.
How They Solved Anthony Edwards
The last thing you wanna do as a sports fan is gain hope after hope has been lost.
In Game 4 of the Wolves vs Nuggets series, Donte DiVincenzo went down and the moment they showed the replay everyone knew he was done for the season. It's the one thing any guard, and really any NBA player, doesn't wanna see… a torn Achilles. And we knew he was going to be out the rest of the year and most of next year.
Then later in the second quarter, Ant went up to contest a layup and came down on his already aggravated knee. And again, when they showed the replay you knew he wasn't coming back. It sucked. All I could do was sit there and think "there is no way we can win now."
I had lost hope.
There was one bright spot. Ayo had come out of seemingly nowhere with 43 points, leading us to the win over the Nuggets that game and giving us the 3-1 series lead.
Then reports came out about Ant. He could return maybe midway through the second round if we did advance, and it became, how do we get one more game just to get a chance.
The odds were not in our favor, but at least there was a light in a dark tunnel. Then in Game 6 we did it. We beat the Nuggets. Now we just had to make it to Game 4 or 5 of the Spurs series and we could have a chance.
Then, what felt like a miracle, I opened Instagram and the very first post was Shams. A picture of Ant with the words "EXPECTED TO PLAY." Nothing could tell you the excitement that I felt. The pieces really felt like they were coming together.
And then it happened. We won Game 1 in what felt like a super fun and dramatic ending. Up eight with three minutes left, we couldn't score and the Spurs would not stop crashing the offensive glass. Julian Champagnie of all people kept tipping in his own teammates' misses. Randle hit a bank floater with 49 seconds left that felt like the dagger, then Wembanyama dunked, then Ant turned it over, then Harper dunked it the other way, and suddenly we were up two with thirty seconds to go.
Randle missed a pullup. The Spurs got the rebound. Champagnie pulled up from 26 feet at the buzzer. Brick. We won.
Ant had turned it over and Harper had dunked. The Wolves still won. I thought nothing of it.
I should have known better. I should have known just how much Donte going down was going to affect us. And I think in the back of my head I knew. But like the optimist I am, the hope was back, the feeling that we could do this was back. I just wish I wasn't so wrong…
Twelve minutes
Twelve minutes. That's all it took for weeks of hope to get thrown out the window.
Game 2's Q1 wasn't great. It ended with a Fox three and a Johnson block on Ayo to close the quarter. But we were only down seven and we had some decent actions, and I still had hope we could come back. Man, I wish I could go back in time and slap myself.
The Wolves cut it to five early in the second quarter. Then San Antonio scored 35 in the next twelve minutes of game clock. The Wolves scored 16. Halftime came with the Wolves down 24.
Two daggers inside that run. With 5:52 left in the half, Wembanyama knocked down a three from twenty-six feet. The shot looked routine. It looked like something he had practiced eight thousand times. The Wolves were suddenly down seventeen.
The other came in the final minute. Harper had already risen from twenty-five feet for the second dagger of the half. Then Edwards turned the ball over twice in the closing seconds, both stolen by Dylan Harper, the second one going the other way for a dunk before Edwards could get back across half court.
Halftime: 59 to 35.
And just like that, the hope was gone again. I knew right then it was going to be next to impossible for the Wolves to pull the series out. The Spurs looked so organized. Every bucket they got looked effortless. Every bucket we got looked like it took everything we had just to get a shot off. It looked so easy for them and so hard for us. Even writing this now, I physically had to step away. I can't help feeling mad and angry and hopeless reliving this series. I knew I needed to find out why it felt this way.
Minnesota's deficit through the second quarter of Game 2, reconstructed from play-by-play. From the moment the Wolves cut it to five, San Antonio outscored them 35 to 16.
Minnesota's deficit through the second quarter of Game 2. The Wolves cut it to five, then watched the Spurs close the half on a 35 to 16 run. Two daggers, both from twenty-five-plus feet.
What the Spurs did
I want to preface with Ant was on a minutes restriction so that does feed into some of the findings below. None the less...
So I started digging. I needed to know exactly what San Antonio had done to him because it felt so surgical.
The "big" number that came back is six-point-two percent.
If you read my last two articles, you know the Wolves play one of the most iso-heavy games of basketball in the league, with Edwards leading that charge. The Spurs were more than happy to let Edwards create. They just made sure he was doing it from the spots that worked for them.
The Wolves’ overall isolation rate ticked up in the playoffs. Edwards still ran more isolation possessions than anyone else on the team. What they took was not his creation role. It was the version of it that had been working.
In the regular season, 13.8 percent of his shots were off-the-catch jumpers. Off-ball moments when the Wolves actually ran something, ending with Ant rising into a clean three. Pin-downs. Flares. The cut that opened the catch behind the action. Those were the possessions where you could see the design. Ant could shoot them. Those looks worked.
Across the six games against San Antonio, that number was 6.2.
The volume tells it even more plainly. In the regular season Edwards took 8.4 threes a game. Against San Antonio, 5.3. They did not just make him miss the threes. They erased a third of the attempts before he could take them.
Catch-and-shoot rate, per 100 attempts
Each dot is one of every 100 Edwards FGAs. The green ones are catch-and-shoots. The grey ones are everything else.
The Spurs were not letting Edwards catch the ball with space to shoot. Every off-ball action, every pindown, every cut, was met with a defender who got home before Edwards's hands could rise. Those off-the-catch threes were gone. Not because Edwards missed them. Because he barely got the chance to take one.
Once they had taken those looks away, they channeled what was left of his offense into the part of the floor he likes least.
His average shot distance fell from 15.3 feet in the regular season to 13.2 feet against the Spurs. Two feet closer to the basket. Doesn't sound like much. Wait until you look at where the shots came from.
The floater zone, 11 to 16 feet from the basket, jumped from 14.6 percent of his attempts to 21.2 percent. They pushed his whole shot diet two feet inside the arc. And with Wembanyama in the paint he had no option but to try from that distance.
You could watch it happen in real time. Edwards would turn the corner, see Wembanyama's long arms already waiting at the rim, and gather for a runner from eleven or twelve feet out. A shot he had to invent on the way up, because everything past it was closed off. That is the shot San Antonio was happy to give him, over and over.
The shape of the scheme: take away the three, protect the rim, let him have the in-between shot. The floater. The runner. The midrange pullup. The shots that, for a player like Edwards, are not where his offense lives.
His efficiency on the smaller portfolio of shots he did take was actually fine. 46.9 percent from the field. The threes he did get up fell at roughly his regular-season clip. The Spurs did not make him miss. They made him not even attempt the shots he is best at.
Edwards's shot diet, regular season to round 2 vs San Antonio. The arc dimmed. The mid-range lit up.
Ant isn't stupid. He saw all of this happening. He read the scheme correctly.
What he did was drive more. His share of driving attempts went from 28.2 percent in the regular season to 40.7 percent in the series. The Spurs were daring him to drive into Wembanyama and find his teammates on the kickout when help came.
He drove. He kicked out.
The problem is that for that to be even remotely successful, the Wolves needed shooters on the other end of the pass, and not just shooters who can hit the open one. Shooters good enough that the help defender thinks twice before leaving them. Shooters whose gravity is what creates the drive in the first place. The Wolves had Donte DiVincenzo, who took more threes than anyone on the roster in the regular season, 644 of them at 38 percent. That is the gravity a drive-and-kick offense runs on. He tore his Achilles in the first round against Denver. After that, the kickout went to Randle, or to Jaden, or to the younger wings, and that group shot well below their regular-season marks the rest of the way. The help defender had clocked that the teammate on the other end probably could not punish him.
The Spurs' scheme was Edwards-specific. Its lethality came from the rest of the roster.
You could see it on individual possessions. Late in the third quarter of Game 1, with the Wolves down two, Edwards drove the lane against Wembanyama and missed the layup. Randle grabbed the rebound and rose for the putback. Wembanyama blocked that too. Randle got the rebound a second time, drew a foul, went to the line, and made one of two. Four shots in five seconds. One point. Wembanyama's ninth block of the night.
In Game 5, with the Wolves trailing by twelve in the third, Edwards tried to find a teammate and threw the ball straight to Keldon Johnson. Three seconds later Johnson was finishing the layup at the other end.
That is the part that should worry the front office. The Spurs took Edwards's best shots away and dared everyone else to beat them. The one player whose shooting actually bends a defense was Donte DiVincenzo, and he watched the series in a walking boot. The bet paid off.
There is one more reason all of this worked, and I don't think it is a surprise to anyone. One player. And I'm sure you can guess his name.
The Wembanyama dimension
On their own, none of the Spurs are anything special. But with Wembanyama behind them, every one of them looked like a stud.
Across six games Wembanyama averaged 19.8 points, 12.0 rebounds, and 4.17 blocks. In Game 1 he blocked twelve shots, even if not all of them were clean, a number that does not usually appear on a stat line in a basketball game. In Game 3, the game where San Antonio took the series back home, he scored 39 points on thirteen-of-eighteen shooting, including three of five from three. The Spurs won the series in Game 6 with him going for 19 and three more blocks.
He was not the most efficient scorer in the series. He was the reason the Wolves' offense had no answer.
Every shot Wembanyama blocked against Minnesota in the second round, by location. Twelve of them came in Game 1 alone. When he was the primary defender, the Wolves shot 34 percent (33 of 96).
Every shot Wembanyama blocked across the six games, by where it happened. Fourteen at the rim, ten in the floater zone, and one he ran down in the left corner.
What makes Wembanyama specifically rare, and the reason the Spurs' scheme worked specifically against the Wolves, is that he can do two defensive things at once that almost no other player can do at all. He can rim-protect from the floater zone, which means a guard who beats his man no longer has the runway to the basket that guard thinks they have. And he can recover onto the perimeter on a closeout fast enough to take away the kickout three. Most rim protectors do one. A few do the other. Wembanyama does both.
2025-26 NBA bigs, regular season
Each dot is a player who logged at least 600 regular-season minutes and lines up at forward or center. X = blocks per 36 minutes. Y = three-point shots contested per 36.
Drop coverage works against the Wolves when the rim protector can also bother the floater. Switching works against the Wolves when the switcher can also block the layup. Wembanyama gives the Spurs both at once.
At some point I plan to do a full breakdown of Wembanyama's game, his strengths, his weaknesses, and how the Wolves can actually beat him. Not yet. With the roster this far from settled, that analysis only makes sense once we know who is going to be on the floor trying to do the beating.
This is the part where you can say we got beaten by a unicorn and not be wrong. With Wembanyama, the scheme has no seams.
Which raises an obvious next question.
Who else can do this
Can anyone else do this? That is the question that matters for next season. If the Spurs are the only team built to take Edwards apart this way, the Wolves got unlucky in the draw. If they are not, the Wolves have a structural problem that follows them into every playoff bracket.
I built a quick composite for every team in the league based on two things: opponent three-point attempt rate (how much you suppress threes against you) and opponent rim field-goal percentage (how well you defend at the basket). The Spurs' scheme needs both. A team that does one without the other can replicate part of it. The seam will be there.
The Wolves' own defense ranks first on this composite. The Spurs are the only other team that is clearly good at both halves at once. They held opponents to 40.5 percent of their shots from three and 63.5 percent at the rim, both better than the league averages of 41.5 and 67.1. After those two, every contender is missing half the scheme. Oklahoma City has the best rim protection in the league, the only team that held opponents under 62 percent at the basket, but they give up more threes than anyone, 44.0 percent. Indiana is the opposite, the best in the league at running you off the line at 37.6 percent and dead average at the rim. Whatever third team you pick, you are picking which half of the scheme they are missing.
The one that worries me is Oklahoma City. Chet Holmgren is a different player than Wembanyama, but the role is close enough: a rim protector who can bother the floater zone, switchable enough to handle the perimeter. The rim protection is already there. What he is still adding, and this is a projection on my part and not a fact yet, is the closeout, the part that takes away the kickout three.
The Wolves will play Oklahoma City at some point in the next playoff bracket if both teams stay healthy. Probably in the conference finals if the seeding holds. The Wolves had better have an answer to the scheme by then.
The full Wembanyama version of the scheme requires Wembanyama. The OKC version requires that Holmgren keep developing into the rim-and-perimeter combo player the league has watched him grow into. Either way, the architectural problem the Wolves ran into in San Antonio is not a one-team problem. It is a class of opponent. The Wolves built their roster for an era when defenses could not do this. Defenses can do this now.
There was a test of this, and it just played out. The Spurs took the same scheme into the Western Conference finals against Oklahoma City and the best rim protection in the league, and beat them in seven. San Antonio is in the Finals. We did not lose to a team that got hot. We lost to the team that came out of the West.
What this leaves us with
The Wolves did not lose the series in those twelve minutes of Game 2. They lost it the day they couldn't punish the Spurs on the arc. The Spurs found a way to take Edwards's threes off the catch. They found a way to let him drive while still protecting the rim. They found a way to make the kickouts harmless, because the help defender knew the teammate on the other end probably couldn't punish them. They took the Wolves apart with calculated defense, and a seven-foot-four Frenchman.
I would be lying if I told you it wasn't fascinating watching Wembanyama play basketball. The things he can do that no one else can are truly amazing. But the most frustrating part about him is that he is 22 years old. Like, we have over a decade more of this to come. We can't do anything about that. What we can do is put together a roster and a game plan to counteract him. I do NOT think we should overfit to just trying to beat him. We did that for Jokic, and look at where we are now. But the roster construction does need to take him into account going into the future.
So that is the project now. Build a team that gives Edwards real options when the next defense decides to do to him what San Antonio did. But the next article asks something harder. Even if you fix this. Even if you find Edwards a real running mate, a Category B wing, a kickout target the help defender has to respect. Is there still a ceiling on what this team can be? Because the historical comps are not great.
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