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Philadelphia threw him away for a halftime show. San Antonio built a Finals roster around him.
There is no cleaner illustration of how roster evaluation can go catastrophically wrong — and catastrophically right — than what happened to Julian Champagnie in the winter of 2023. The Philadelphia 76ers cut a 22-year-old rookie not because he couldn’t play, not because of injury, and not because a star was coming to town. They cut him, according to Front Office Sports, to free up a roster spot so that Mac McClung could qualify for the NBA Slam Dunk Contest. That’s the transaction that launched one of the best-value contract stories in recent NBA memory — and now has Champagnie on the biggest stage in basketball.
The Sixers’ gift to San Antonio
When you get waived to make room for a dunk contest entry, you’d be forgiven for thinking your career is over. Per Front Office Sports, Champagnie has said that’s essentially what he believed in that moment. Instead, he landed in San Antonio within days, joining a Spurs franchise mid-tank, still months away from drafting Victor Wembanyama. That context matters enormously. The Spurs didn’t sign Champagnie because they needed him to win right now — they signed him because then-coach Gregg Popovich reportedly identified a specific skill the team could develop: shooting the basketball. You can talk all you want about culture and process, but what the Spurs actually did was see a shooter that Philadelphia’s front office had literally deprioritized behind a spectacle.
The McClung chapter has its own arc — Front Office Sports reports he went on to win multiple Dunk Contest titles. But dunk contest titles don’t appear in playoff box scores. Champagnie does.
The contract that should haunt every front office
Once Wembanyama arrived via the draft lottery, San Antonio made a quiet but consequential decision: lock Champagnie up on a four-year deal worth $12 million total — just $3 million per year, per Front Office Sports. At the time, it barely registered as news. In hindsight, it looks like one of the shrewdest anchor signings of the rebuilding era. That number is essentially a rounding error in today’s cap environment, and yet Champagnie delivered a career-high scoring season this year and became the connective tissue of a roster built around Wembanyama, De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper.
The real inflection point came in late December, when head coach Mitch Johnson — who took over after Popovich suffered a stroke in November 2024, per the source — moved Champagnie into the starting lineup over veteran Harrison Barnes. That single lineup adjustment, according to Front Office Sports, helped the Spurs post a 39-11 record the rest of the way. One personnel decision, made at minimum cost, reshaping an entire season’s trajectory. That’s not luck. That’s what it looks like when a front office accumulates optionality by collecting shooters on sensible deals.
Clutch when it mattered most
The regular-season story is compelling enough. But Champagnie’s playoff performance is what separates a nice narrative from a legitimate Finals-shaping argument. Per Front Office Sports, in the final three games of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder — all must-win situations for San Antonio — Champagnie reportedly averaged over 17 points and shot nearly 48 percent from three. He also reportedly scored 20 points in the decisive Game 7. Johnson reportedly called him the team’s “unsung hero.” That framing undersells it. An unsung hero doesn’t torch defenses in elimination games. Champagnie stopped being a role player the moment the margin for error evaporated.
Why the Finals setting is almost poetic
Now the Spurs face the New York Knicks, and here is where the story turns almost cinematic. Champagnie is a Brooklyn native who played high school basketball in New York and college basketball at St. John’s, a program that calls Madison Square Garden its home court, according to Front Office Sports. He knows that building. He’s felt those crowds. For a young Spurs team with limited Finals experience, having a player who is genuinely at home in the building where they’ll be playing road games is a tactical and psychological asset that doesn’t show up in the salary cap math.
The broader point here is about how value actually gets created in the modern NBA. It doesn’t always come from the supermax extension or the blockbuster trade. Sometimes it comes from recognizing what a 22-year-old can do when given a role and a reason to stay. Philadelphia prioritized a highlight reel. San Antonio prioritized a basketball player. Three million dollars a year later, we know who was right.
The Spurs hold a team option on Champagnie’s deal for next season, per Front Office Sports — meaning they can keep him at that same bargain rate or let him walk and re-sign him at market value. Either way, the original bet has already paid off. The only question now is whether he cashes it in with a ring at the Garden.
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