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The Spurs didn’t just get lucky — they got lucky three times in a row. That window is now permanently closed.
The San Antonio Spurs are in the 2026 NBA Finals, and the story of how they got there is one the league just voted to make sure never happens again. Three drafts. Three lottery climbs. Three potential cornerstones. That’s the blueprint — and starting in 2027, it is constitutionally prohibited. Not discouraged. Not unlikely. Prohibited. The NBA essentially looked at what San Antonio built and decided the rest of the league deserved protection from it.
Three picks that shouldn’t all belong to the same team
Let’s lay it out plainly. According to the Yahoo Sports source article, the Spurs landed Victor Wembanyama at No. 1 in 2023, Stephon Castle at No. 4 in 2024, and Dylan Harper at No. 2 in 2025. That’s a franchise centerpiece, a starting-caliber guard, and another high-upside perimeter piece — all before any of them turned 22. The source notes the Spurs moved up in the lottery for each selection, including a reported six-spot vault to grab Harper after a 34-48 season. In any other universe, a team narrowly missing on Cooper Flagg and still coming away with the No. 2 pick would be considered a catastrophic stroke of luck. For San Antonio, it was just the third consecutive chapter of a lottery fairy tale.
The counterargument writes itself: the Spurs still had to develop these players. Wembanyama didn’t walk into a championship; the franchise had to endure years of rebuilding, and the coaching staff had to build a system around a genuinely unprecedented skill set. That’s fair. But development only matters if you have the talent to develop. San Antonio had three swings in three years at the very top of the draft. Most franchises wait a decade for one.
The new rules don’t just discourage this — they make it structurally impossible
The NBA’s newly approved lottery reform, set to govern the 2027 through 2029 drafts, contains two provisions that target exactly this kind of accumulation. Per the source article, no team may hold the No. 1 overall pick in back-to-back drafts, and no team can pick in the top five in three consecutive years. Had these rules existed one cycle earlier, Harper never becomes a Spur. Full stop. That’s not a hypothetical — it’s a mathematical certainty. The Spurs would have been ineligible.
There is a genuinely complicated wrinkle buried in the reform, though. The restrictions attach to the originating team’s pick, not to whoever ultimately holds it. So a team that trades away a high pick — say, as part of a win-now deal — can inadvertently poison the value of that asset for the team acquiring it. The source article flags the Memphis Grizzlies as a real-world case study. Memphis holds a favorable 2027 first-rounder from the Utah Jazz, among other teams, stemming from the Jaren Jackson Jr. trade. But Utah picked second overall in 2025 and fifth in 2024, meaning if they land in the lottery again in 2027, their pick is ineligible to land higher than sixth — regardless of where the ball bounces. Memphis, notably reported as the lone team to vote against the reform, now holds an asset that has been structurally capped before the draft even happens. That is a real competitive cost, and it accrues to a team that did nothing wrong except acquire a pick through normal roster-building.
Depth and fortune are not mutually exclusive
It would be reductive to frame the Spurs as a one-trick lottery pony. The source article points out that Devin Vassell (No. 11), Carter Bryant (No. 14), and Sixth Man of the Year candidate Keldon Johnson (No. 29) round out a roster built almost entirely through the draft. Julian Champagnie, a claimed waiver wire addition with genuine shooting and durability, is a legitimate contributor. Luke Kornet, signed in free agency, delivered a moment in the Western Conference Finals that will live in franchise lore. De’Aaron Fox, acquired via trade, stabilized the point guard position when the youngest parts of the roster needed the most cover.
This is a well-constructed team, not just a lucky one. But the architecture only works because the foundation is Wembanyama, with Castle and Harper as load-bearing walls. All three came from the lottery. All three came in consecutive years. And all three came because the ping-pong balls treated San Antonio like a VIP.
Why this reform feels personal — and why it matters beyond San Antonio
The NBA framed this overhaul as an anti-tanking measure, a way to keep competitive balance from eroding into a race to the bottom every spring. And on its face, that’s defensible. Nobody buys a ticket in March to watch a team deliberately underperform. But the reform’s real-world effect is more surgical than general. It doesn’t just discourage multi-year lottery camping — it retroactively limits the value of picks that franchises have already traded for or received in good faith. The Memphis situation is the canary in the coal mine. Teams will need draft lawyers just to assess whether a traded pick is worth what it used to be.
The Spurs are playing Finals basketball right now because the rules allowed it. That’s not a criticism — it’s context. They played within the system as it existed and built something remarkable. What the NBA is really saying with this reform is that it watched what happened in San Antonio and decided the sport couldn’t afford another one. Whether that’s wise league governance or quiet jealousy dressed up as policy is a debate worth having. But one thing is certain: the path San Antonio walked is now a closed road.
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