Devin Vassell and Keldon Johnson have waited years for this. San Antonio, the West's No. 2 seed, opens the NBA playoffs this week against the Portland Trail Blazers, and the Spurs are back in the postseason after winning at least 60 games for the first time since 2016-17.
“Me and KJ are super excited,” Vassell said during media availability this week. “It’s been long overdue, but we’re here, and we’re ready to go.” For Vassell, now the Spurs’ second-longest-tenured player behind Johnson, the moment lands after a sixth-year run in which neither he nor Johnson had ever finished a full season above.500 until now.
That matters because these are not the same Spurs that last played a postseason game. No player from that roster remains on the team today, and the franchise has not appeared in the playoffs since the pre-pandemic days. Johnson was drafted near the bottom of the first round the year after that last appearance, and Vassell arrived a year later, putting both players in position to grow up with a team that was rebuilding in real time.
This year, that rebuild has broken through largely because Victor Wembanyama has emerged as one of the best players in the world. His rise helped push San Antonio into one of the top spots in the West and gave Vassell and Johnson their first full-season taste of winning basketball. Vassell said the reward has already started to feel real, even before a playoff game has been played. “Feeling great, a week off feels great,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of great work in, a lot of great practice, reps, watching film.”
Still, the break has not dulled the edge. “I feel a little antsy, like I’m ready to play — I haven’t not played for a week, it feels really weird,” Vassell said. The Spurs host Portland, the West’s eight-seed, in Game 1 on Sunday at 8 p.m. CT on NBC and Peacock, and Vassell said the approach will not change. “Our plan is just to be the same, focus on us, and do the same stuff that we’ve been doing this past 82, 83 games that we played.”