Category: Sports News

Welcome to Pounding the Rock’s 2025-26 player reviews! The series will look at the players who finished the season with the San Antonio Spurs on guaranteed contracts and who played consequential minutes and/or a vital role (so no two-way players because we hardly saw them this year, no players who were traded away, and none of the deep bench centers, since they were both irrelevant and are now all gone).

Luke Kornet

2025-26 stats: 68 games, 21 MPG, 6.5 points, 6.1 rebounds, 1 block, 64.3 FG%

Contract Status: 3 years, $29.7 million remaining (team option for 2028-29)

Age: 31

Following the 2024-25 season, the Spurs knew their biggest weakness was size and production behind Victor Wembaynama. After trading Zach Collins as part of the De’Aaron Fox trade, losing Charles Bassey to yet another knee injury and finally Wemby to deep vein thrombosis, they were left scrambling for size, resulting in the signing of Bismack Biyombo and more than enough small ball. It was fine since the postseason became a far reach without Wemby (although to the remaining players’ credit, they never stopped trying), but the Spurs would have to get better at backup center if they wanted to reach new heights this season.

They did just that with the under-the-radar signing of Luke Kornet — a veteran, championship-winning center from the Boston Celtics — on a team-friendly deal. Not much was made of it at the time, but it was soon seen as one of the best pick-ups of free agency. Not only was the Spurs’ defense drastically improved overall, but there was much less drop-off when Wemby left the court compared to previous seasons thanks in part to Kornet’s size and underrated (if unspectacular) rim protection. Players who thought they had a free lane to the basket once Wemby left the court quickly learned otherwise. (It may have been less daunting, but certainly not free.)

Kornet especially got to shine early in the season, with Wemby missing 12 straight games between November and December with a calf strain, followed by 6 coming off then bench on a minutes restriction, resulting in Kornet starting for 17 of 18 games (he missed one of his own). In those games, the Spurs went 15-2 with Kornet’s numbers remaining consistent on a per-minute basis without much drop-off as a team. One of his best performances of the season came in that time frame, with a 20-12 double-double in a win in Washington, and of course there was his best play of the regular season: a game-winning, buzzer-beating block of Franz Wagner in Orlando.

He continued to be steady and productive even back in a bench role for the rest of the regular season, with his main weakness being availability (he missed 14 games with various ailments, fortunately without too much overlap with Wemby). However, the playoffs were another story, as he (and seemingly every other bench player not named Dylan Harper) saw his production plummet as the strength of opponent rose, likely skewing his final grade here a bit.

After three straight games scorning in double figures and posting a positive plus-minus to open the playoffs against Portland, his highest scoring game the rest of the way was 7 points in a Game 5 loss to Minnesota (the Wemby ejection game), and the only time he posted a positive plus-minus in a non-blowout game was Game 7 against the Thunder, but what a big game it was. Even though it wasn’t a huge night statistically for Kornet, he provided perhaps their most important play of the postseason: a chase-down block of Isaiah Hartenstein in the fourth quarter that sucked the life out of the Thunder as they made a last ditch effort to come back while Wemby sat with foul trouble.

It’s a play that helped the Spurs win the Western Conference Finals and will go down as one of their best postseason blocks ever, etching Kornet into Spurs playoff lore. Unfortunately, that momentum didn’t carry over to the Finals — for Kornet or the Spurs.

Looking ahead

Kornet will likely play the same role next season: backing up Wemby. There won’t be much doubt in the regular season, but the Spurs will need better production from him (and again, the entire bench) in the playoffs if they hope to win a championship, especially considering exhaustion appeared to play a big role in their Finals loss. Also, it may not be immediate, but Kornet will eventually be looking over his shoulder with the Spurs going for size in the draft with Jayden Quaintance and Tarris Reed, the latter who is healthy and possibly NBA-ready if he gets hurt or his production stumbles.

Kornet’s contract makes him a very tradable asset should the Spurs see the need to shake things up at any point in the next few seasons, but it also gives them a very productive bench player on the cheap in a time when they’ll have to start making some tough financial decisions. He was arguably the best backup center in the league last season by providing exactly what they needed: solid minutes to back up and even replace Wemby at times without a massive drop in production. Expecting much more from him is a stretch, but simply hoping it carries over into the playoffs doesn’t seem like too much to ask, especially from a player who has won a championship playing the same role before.

Top Performance

14 points, 10 rebounds, 2 blocks in Round 1, Game 3 @ Portland Trail Blazers

While Kornet had games with bigger numbers early in the season when Wemby missed extensive time and more memorable moments (such as the Wagner and Hartenstein blocks), this was by far his most important performance for the Spurs, with Wemby out with a concussion and the series tied 1-1 heading out on the road. While Wemby only ended up missing one game, Kornet’s stabilizing performance was certainly reassuring in an uncertain time and helped put the Spurs back in the driver’s seat with a crucial 120-108 win.

Final Grade: B-

Up next: Dylan Harper

Previous Reviews

Jordan McLaughlin

Carter Bryant

Somewhere in Oklahoma City right now there’s a front office that understands something the rest of the league is still catching up on. Seventy-three wins isn’t a number. It’s a dare. And this year the Thunder walked right up to it, put their hand on the door, and found out the same thing Dub Nation found out a decade ago. The record doesn’t just test your talent. It tests what’s left of you in the postseason.

Ten years ago the Warriors ran a 73-9 season that nobody has sniffed since, chasing history for six straight months while the whole league lined up to see if the Dubs would flinch or crack. They eventually fell short in the when it actually counted, when a 3-1 Finals lead evaporated against a Cleveland team that pulled off a miracle, and every talking head in America got to spend a summer calling the greatest regular season ever played a punchline. Nobody remembers the 73 wins the way they remember the collapse. That’s the tax folks. Chase the ghost and if you don’t finish the job, the ghost chases you back.

So when Oklahoma City opened this season 20-1, then 24-1, matching GSW’s pace game for game a decade later, I’ll admit there was a part of me that wanted to see it happen. Not for them but for the conversation. Let somebody else carry that weight for a change. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander did, standing at a podium in Vegas, telling reporters the record means something to him and his group because winning matters “no matter what form it looks like.” They fell short of the record, but at least had the idea of the repeat fresh in their eyes. OKC responded the way champs do. They swept the Suns and the Lakers, rolling into the Western Conference Finals looking every bit like the machine that was supposed to run this whole league over for the next five years.

And then, right on cue, San Antonio showed up and ruined their back-to-back dreams. Spurs in seven, Thunder’s Finals repeat bid buried before the calendar even hit June, San Antonio marching on to face the Knicks for the whole thing while Oklahoma City packed lockers early for the first time since they climbed this mountain.

I know that feeling. Dub Nation built a statue to the 73 wins and then had to watch somebody else hoist the trophy that summer too. So let me be the first team from the other side of this specific heartbreak to say it plainly: welcome to the club nobody wants a membership card for. You built the best regular season we’ve seen since ours. You still walked out of the postseason owing more than you won. The house always finds a way to collect on that kind of debt, and it doesn’t care how many national TV games you won along the way.

The Thunder don’t get to chase 73 wins and repeat titles and skip the part where it humbles you. Nobody gets that discount. We know exactly how loud the outside noise gets when you’re the best team in basketball for the regular season and somehow still be humiliated in the end. It’s the worst kind of quiet, the one where everything you spent seven months building gets rewritten in two weeks.

But here’s the other half of it: Get up. GSW did. It took real work and a full year of people doubting whether that Warriors core still had a beating heart in it, and they came back and buried the noise under a parade. That’s the only way this story ever gets rewritten. Not by chasing a number. By going back to the mountain and finishing the job the second time, when everybody’s already decided you can’t.

Prove you’re the dynasty everybody thought you were. Or fade into the background like all the other would be dynasties who were exposed as one and done.

LAS VEGAS — The lights are bright, the stars are both on and off the court, and there are games being played by NBA players in both college- and high school-sized arenas. There’s nothing like the NBA Summer League. From seeing Buffalo Bills wide receiver Keon Coleman, walking past star NBA broadcasters Mark Jones and Michael Grady, to casually striking up conversations with DeMarcus Cousins and Jeff Van Gundy, it’s not only a spectacle but also a hodgepodge of some of the most important people in the hoops and media worlds.

Coming into the event, I didn’t know what to expect except for one thing: a lot of networking opportunities. With the games being of minimal consequence compared with regular-season and playoff games, and with all 30 teams playing, most reporters, agents, and members of NBA organizations view Summer League as an opportunity to grow their personal networks and build on already established relationships.

In my first two months since graduating from college, I’ve found that searching for full-time media positions is no fun, let alone easy, and the best way to do it is by building relationships with people, something I’ve been doing since I was a freshman at Syracuse University. I was excited and prepared for the chance to meet so many people I could learn from as I looked for ways to navigate an industry with no linear path.

In a career as competitive as sports media that continues to shrink by the day, connections are everything. In Vegas, I was told by an NBA executive who worked in media for nearly 20 years that if you want a chance to make it, you need to work hard, outlast people, and, most importantly, be someone people want to work with. In most industries, doing those three things would guarantee success, but not in media.

You have to get your name out there. ESPN NBA Insider Shams Charania hasn’t gotten the top scoops for years just because he’s a great writer and broadcaster; it’s because of the relationships he’s built, and the NBA Summer League is the perfect place to make more of them.

No matter who you are, people will most likely talk to you for at least a few minutes if you’re aware of the time and place. You can make an impression on anyone you meet.

Knowing the value proposition of going to Summer League when I had Southwest points and time at my disposal, I did not take this opportunity lightly. At the NBA Summer League, the games come second; meeting and building relationships with people come first. I didn’t just spend time dissecting Koby Brea’s three-point percentage or analyzing Khaman Maluach’s ability to be a force in the paint; I spent hours dissecting who the people were that I wanted to talk to at Summer League in preparation for making my interactions memorable. I even made a plan for how I wanted to introduce myself and the specific questions I wanted to ask certain people.

Sorry about the bad handwriting.

I tried to make every interaction I could have with people as intentional and specific as possible. A lot of people want to talk to a lot of people, especially NBA reporters.

Here’s a question I wanted to ask NBA Insider Chris Haynes that I thought could be really helpful for a young journalist to know. It ended up paying off, as he said I had an “unforgettable first impression.”

To have not only productive but also memorable brief conversations that can turn into relationships, you need to demonstrate to people that you know who you’re talking to and that you want to actually get to know them, not just get something out of them. This becomes especially important when you are starting your career and are not established in the industry.

Along with building new relationships, fortifying older ones is just as important. Getting to see people in person whom you’ve only spoken to on Zoom or FaceTime is a signal that you are eager to build on the connections you’ve made when you weren’t able to see them in person. The impression of approaching people and finally connecting with them after only meeting virtually is especially important and impactful when you are young, just getting started in the sports media industry, or both.

Getting in contact with, let alone making an impact on, executives, agents, or reporters who cover the NBA year-round is already a hard enough task, and being physically around the people who help tell the stories of the game can make you more memorable.

It’s one of the only times on the NBA calendar that the most important people for reporters to interact with aren’t the players. It may be the beginning of many relationships with players, but there isn’t another time when as many executives, agents, and other reporters are within the same mile radius.

While it may seem counterintuitive, you become a better writer by listening. You learn more stories when you introduce yourself to more people, and your coverage gets richer the more perspectives you have. At NBA Summer League, your next byline can improve by talking to other people who publish bylines, not just the athletes who play on the hardwood.

That’s the hidden value of Summer League. The games will end, the box scores will be forgotten, and the next NBA season will take over. But the conversations, relationships, and lessons learned away from the court can have a lasting impact. For someone trying to break into this industry, the biggest opportunities aren’t always found by watching the action. Sometimes, they come from being eager and willing to show up and listen.

I consider myself something of a modern day basketball historian. With the rise of the internet and misinformation, it’s easy for people to get caught up in the hoopla of social media and miss parallels to the past that teach us so much about basketball and life.

That’s what got me thinking about the San Antonio Spurs’ shocking NBA Finals run and their stunning collapse to the New York Knicks.

San Antonio had the Knicks on the ropes in Game 4. Twenty-nine points up. First quarters won by a combined 57 points across the series. Wembanyama blocking shots like he was swatting flies off a porch. And then it slipped, the way these things always slip when a team hasn’t lived through the moment enough times to trust it.

Final result, five games, Knicks banner number four hanging in the Garden by fall. Jalen Brunson walking off with Finals MVP and a stat line that read like a man who’d been rehearsing this exact night since he was a kid shooting in his driveway.The Spurs went home with proof they belong, proof the timeline is real, and, if history is any kind of teacher, proof of how easy it is to waste both.

We’ve seen this movie before. Go back to 2012, a Thunder team built on a rookie scale contract and a prayer, Kevin Durant still growing into his frame, James Harden just getting his beard activated, and Russell Westbrook playing like his hair was on fire. Nobody had that team penciled in for a Finals, and they went anyway, right through the Lakers and the Spurs and the Mavericks.

That’s the part San Antonio just lived. Wembanyama is 22. Stephon Castle is 21. De’Aaron Fox barely got there and is still learning how his game fits inside a team that wasn’t built with him in mind yet. This is a group that shot out of the West at 4-3 over Oklahoma City and took the eventual champion to five games.

Flashback to how Miami unraveled the Thunder. The Heat had LeBron in his prime, Wade still Wade, a roster that had already been humbled once and come back meaner for it. The end result: Heat in five.The lesson OKC took from that series wasn’t written down anywhere, but it should have been tattooed on the locker room wall: young talent might you to the door once. It does not automatically walk you through it again next year, or the year after that, or ever.

That’s exactly where the Spurs are standing right now, whether anyone in that building wants to admit it. San Antonio now knows what it feels like to blow a 29 point lead on a national stage, to watch a grown men in orange and blue outsmart and bully them into playing out of character. You cannot manufacture that kind of film session. You have to bleed for it, and now they have.

Nobody in Oklahoma City believed a fall was coming in the summer of 2012. Why would they? Their core was in their early 20s.The whole basketball world assumed OKC would run it back five or six times over, showing up again and again with more mileage and less rust. Instead the front office traded Harden that same offseason, injuries piled up in the years after, Durant walked in 2016, and that specific version of the Thunder never got back to a Finals. No single move explains all of it. One great run became the assumption instead of the foundation, and everything after that got a little easier to lose.

San Antonio’s got a core this specific, this young, this obviously built around a seven footer who moves like he’s got no business being that big, and the margin between running it back next June and becoming a “remember when” story is razor thin. What happens next comes down to the next fourteen months. The vets they bring in have to teach something instead of just filling a roster spot. This exact group has to get another shot before somebody else’s timeline swallows theirs whole.

History doesn’t owe young, exciting teams a second trip. It only owes them the first one, the trip that gets people talking and eventually ends up in every “remember when” conversation whether or not anything ever comes of it. What happens after that is on them.

Ask the 2012 Thunder how that part goes if you don’t believe me.

Why?

Because you just can’t get enough Johnny Dawkins.

On Thursday, we looked back at Johnny D’s masterful play against Notre Dame in 1986, where he blocked David Rivers at the buzzer to preserve a one-point Duke victory in Cameron.

This play is from his NBA days with the Philadelphia 76ers.

He hits a clutch shot here to boost the Sixers past the Portland Trailblazers, 104-102. Dawkins had 23 points and 10 assists. He was a terrific player before injuries caught up to him.

Also on the Sixers: former Blue Devil Mike Gminski, Charles Barkley, former NC State star Charles Shackleford, and Manute Bol. It must have been an amazing locker room.

Also in the game, but we didn’t spot him here: Alaa Abdelnaby, who was with the Portland Trail Blazers. Portland also featured Maryland star Buck Williams, who is wearing the goggles. You’ll see him guarding Bol.

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The Warriors’ rival report has it’s final opponent in the crosshairs down in L.A. but it ain’t the Lakers. The Clippers are the one Pacific team whose offseason can’t really be graded yet, because the trade that defines it hasn’t actually closed. Before Golden State gets to the part of the summer where every team’s roster feels settled, it’s worth checking in on the one division rival still waiting on the league office to tell them who’s actually on their team.

On paper, the moves are straightforward enough. Quiet business: re-signings, a small trade for center Johni Broome, a two-way deal for center Jamarion Sharp. The one that actually reshapes the roster is the deal sending Kawhi Leonard to Toronto for Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick, along with a package of picks. Everyone covering the team, from beat writers to fan sites, has spent July writing rotation projections that assume this trade is basically done.

It isn’t. The Clippers and Raptors agreed to it on June 30. Nine days later, both teams announced it was on hold. The Clippers built a roster the league hasn’t signed off on yet. The holdup is an NBA investigation into whether the Clippers circumvented the salary cap to pay Leonard, tied to a since-collapsed endorsement deal with the company Aspiration.

ESPN’s Baxter Holmes reported that the case could stretch into 2027 if the Clippers and the players’ union can’t agree on any findings or proposed punishment. Commissioner Adam Silver has said the investigation needs to wrap before next season starts, but has also acknowledged it’s already gone on longer than he’d hoped. The union has said it won’t hesitate to fight any penalty it sees as unsupported by evidence, and the Clippers have maintained from the start that they never funneled money to Leonard at all.

Meanwhile, basketball analysis has largely moved forward as though the trade is inevitable, projecting Brandon Ingram into the starting lineup and Gradey Dick into the wing rotation before the league has approved any of it. 213hoops’ Robert Flom took the more grounded approach, and it’s probably the more useful one for a fan base trying to figure out what to actually expect this season.

Flom placed the Clippers somewhere in the 9-to-12 range in the West regardless of how the roster shakes out, clearing only the Kings and Pelicans with real confidence. He projected a win total anywhere from the low 30s to the mid 40s, called this the first Clippers season since 2018 without real playoff expectations, and suggested that’s actually not the worst thing, since it might make the year more fun to watch without the pressure of a playoff push riding on it.

So the Clippers enter the season with two different stories running at once. One is a basketball team quietly preparing for a future built around Brandon Ingram, assuming the trade becomes official. The other is a franchise waiting on a law firm and a players’ union to decide whether that trade, and the season built around it, is even allowed to exist as constructed.

Every other team in the Pacific spent the summer answering questions about its roster. The Clippers are still waiting to find out what theirs officially is. Until the league closes the investigation, every projection comes with an asterisk. The Warriors won’t know exactly what they’re preparing for until the NBA decides which Clippers roster is actually allowed to exist.