Ten years ago this week, LeBron James dragged the Cleveland Cavaliers back from the dead. Down 3-1 to a 73-win Golden State Warriors team, James and Kyrie Irving dropped 41 points apiece in Game 5 to keep the season alive. Cleveland went on to become the first — and still only — team to erase a 3-1 deficit in the NBA Finals.
On Saturday night in San Antonio, Victor Wembanyama and the Spurs step onto their home floor facing an eerily similar mountain. They trail the New York Knicks 3-1 in the 2026 Finals. Game 5 falls on June 13 — exactly one decade after James’s Game 5 masterpiece.
The parallels don’t stop with the calendar.
Like the 2016 Cavs, the Spurs dropped the first two games of the series. Unlike Cleveland, San Antonio lost both of those at home — a historically grim position. No team has ever come back to win a title after dropping the first two games of the Finals at home. The Cavs at least had the excuse of facing the Warriors on the road.
Still, the Spurs control large stretches of every game. Two of their losses came by a single point. They held a lead of at least 10 points in three of the four games. The most devastating was Game 4 at Madison Square Garden, where San Antonio blew a 29-point advantage — the largest collapse in NBA Finals history. That kind of loss doesn’t just sting; it leaves a mental scar.
“I think it’s going to go one of two ways,” Wembanyama said after the Game 4 heartbreak. “The bad one would be giving up. The good one would be getting stronger through this, getting more together. I know this is what we’re going to do.”
The 22-year-old French phenom is averaging 27.8 points through four games on 43.5 percent shooting — a slightly higher scoring output than LeBron’s 24.8 points through the same stage in 2016. Wembanyama has taken 85 shots, exactly matching the number James had before Game 5 a decade ago. The Spurs’ team offensive rating (108.7) entering Game 5 actually exceeds the Cavs’ rating (105.5) at the same point in 2016.
Where the comparison gets messy is experience. James was a two-time champion and four-time MVP in 2016, in his prime and with the scars of previous Finals losses. Wembanyama is in his second season, making his first Finals appearance. The Spurs roster features only one player who was on the floor for the 2016 collapse: veteran Harrison Barnes, who played for those Warriors and watched James’s comeback from the wrong side of history.
“We’ve pretty much dictated the winner and loser of all these games,” Spurs guard Stephon Castle said. “I think just us finishing games and trying to maintain our leads has been tough for us.”
Keldon Johnson echoed that belief. “As much as it hurts, we’re still playing. I feel like we have a special group. We’re back at it, and we believe we can get it done. That’s not going to change regardless.”
If the Spurs do pull off the impossible, they wouldn’t just match LeBron’s feat — they’d surpass it. Cleveland never lost a 29-point lead in that series. They never lost a game at home in the Finals. The Spurs have done both. And while Wembanyama has the talent to drag his team back, history suggests that the mental toll of Game 4’s collapse will be harder to overcome than any deficit on the scoreboard.
All it takes is one win to change the energy. The Cavs proved that. Now Wembanyama gets his chance to prove whether he can follow the blueprint — or whether that 29-point meltdown will be the lasting memory of San Antonio’s otherwise remarkable season.
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