The Spurs are the youngest NBA finalists in almost 50 years
· Yahoo Sports
To say the San Antonio Spurs' rise to the championship contender tier has been surprising would be underselling the point.
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Prior to the 2025-26 NBA season, according to Basketball-Reference, San Antonio had the 16th-best odds to win a championship this year, behind the likes of the Milwaukee Bucks, the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks. Meanwhile, their win-loss over-under was 44.5 games. So while most expected the Spurs to have a solid season in this, Victor Wembanyama's third career campaign, no one outside of San Antonio thought they'd be the team to knock off the Oklahoma City Thunder in their quest for a repeat.
And yet, here we are, as Wembanyama and Co. are four games away from winning a highly unexpected championship, one that could lead to some uncomfortable conversations about the French big man's potential career ceiling.
One of the reasons that not many thought San Antonio could make a deep run this season is because of the team's collective age. According to our research, using a weighted average that takes into account minutes played by each player, the Spurs are 25.15 years old on average, making them the youngest team since the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers to make it to the NBA Finals. Ironically enough, the team that San Antonio just edged out in this exercise is once again the Thunder, as the 2024-25 Oklahoma City squad had a weighted average age of 25.71 years.
Per our research, the Spurs boast an astonishing four players under the age of 23 who account for just south of 40 percent of their playoff minutes: Stephon Castle (21.6 years old), Wembanyama (22.4), Dylan Harper (20.2) and Carter Bryant (20.5). Those four players have combined for 1,778 of the team's 4,512 playoff minutes so far, i.e., 39.4 percent of the total. No Finals team in our database has leaned this heavily on players under 23.
What's more, only four NBA finalists before had ever had their Top 3 minute-getters all under 26: the 1966-67 Warriors, 1976-77 Trail Blazers, 1978-79 SuperSonics and 2011-12 Thunder. The Spurs are the fifth such team to qualify for that distinction.
Of course, this may lead many to think the Spurs are set to embark on a dynasty so potent that it might put their Tim Duncan-led golden days to shame, but things just don't work like that in the NBA. Plenty of the previous youngest teams to reach the NBA Finals, like the '77 Blazers (25.02 years of age on weighted average), the '67 Warriors (26.05) and the '86 Rockets (26.23) did not have much championship success after reaching (and in the Blazers' case, winning) the Finals those years.
So health will still be hugely important for the Spurs' chances of creating a dynasty, although we are somewhat grasping at straws here, as it's hard not to see San Antonio going on a great run over the coming years, with how loaded its young core is. The Thunder will also continue to be a huge rival for the Spurs going forward, though.
Speaking of Oklahoma City, the Thunder of last year were also quite young (25.71 average weighted age) when they made their trip to the Finals and won their championship. That means we're looking at the prospect that the league's last two champions (if San Antonio does manage to finish this job against the New York Knicks) would be two of the NBA's youngest champions ever, going against the preconceived notion that experience is paramount in the playoffs. Maybe that used to be true, but in this era, in part due to more injuries but also because of the randomness of modern basketball - with so many launched threes, long offensive rebounds, etc. - or whatever else, that no longer appears to be the case to the same extent.
After all, we can't just ignore the fact that Oklahoma City suffered injuries to two of its top offensive weapons in the playoffs, Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell, which absolutely contributed to San Antonio taking care of the Thunder in seven games. OKC winning the 2025 NBA Finals in seven games also had an injury-related aspect, as the Indiana Pacers' top star, Tyrese Haliburton, blew out his Achilles tendon in the decisive seventh game.
We'll get another good test of how much experience matters in these upcoming Finals, however, as the Knicks have a collective weighted age of 29.22 years old. Maybe the fact that New York is older will give it an unexpected leg up in the upcoming series, though it's not like any of the Knicks players have NBA Finals experience themselves. Even so, we're in for a fascinating matchup.
This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: The Spurs are the youngest NBA finalists in almost 50 years