OKLAHOMA CITY — The last time star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Oklahoma City Thunder played a Game 7, it was basketball’s ultimate game of ultimate games, the decisive matchup in the 2025 NBA Finals.
And that’s why, as the two-time league MVP spoke about the Game 7 that looms against the visiting San Antonio Spurs on Saturday night to decide the Western Conference title, it might have seemed mildly surprising that he said these five words: “Biggest game of my career.”
“It’s the next game,” he quickly added. “And if I lose, my season’s over.”
Simple as that. Game 7. Spurs versus Thunder. The winner goes to the NBA Finals to play the Eastern Conference champion New York Knicks starting Wednesday night, the loser goes home to lament what might have been.
The Thunder went 2-0 in Game 7 matchups last season on their way to the NBA title, while 22-year-old Spurs star Victor Wembanyama will be making his maiden appearance on the Game 7 stage.
“I know there’ll be a lot of added attention, a lot of eyes watching,” San Antonio coach Mitch Johnson said. “It’ll be a hostile environment, but we’ve been saying this for a long time: We’ve had a lot of firsts. This one will be a little bit more important or higher stakes than all the others. That’s the goal as you keep playing and the season gets longer.”
This will be only the second time in NBA history when two teams that won 62 or more games each during the regular season meet in a Game 7. The other was in 1981, when the Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers 91-90 to win the Eastern Conference title.
And it could be easily argued that Wembanyama is about to play the biggest game of his career.
Then again, he might take exception to that.
In the mind of the 7-foot-4 French star, who had 28 points in 28 minutes Thursday night at home to lead the second-seeded Spurs’ 118-91 romp in Game 6 that staved off elimination and got them into Game 7, every game is Game 7. It’s the attitude that he has taken to the court for as long as he can remember. It’s the approach that shaped him and probably helped him get to this moment.
“For me, winning in the NBA today isn’t any more important than winning a regional championship back when I was playing in the U13 division,” Wembanyama said in his native French after Thursday’s victory against the top-seeded Thunder. “The competitive drive feels exactly the same.”
Game 1 was a double-overtime thriller, with neither team ever leading by more than 10 points before the Spurs eventually prevailed. And in Game 2, Oklahoma City’s biggest lead was 13 before the Thunder won by nine.
The gaps have grown as the series goes along. Both teams led by at least 15 points at times in Game 3 (a 15-point win by the Thunder), the Spurs led by as many as 25 before winning Game 4 by 21, the Thunder led by 20 before winning Game 5 by 13, and the Spurs led by 28 before winning Game 6 by 27.
So the games themselves might not have all been classics. The series, as a whole, looks like one.
And after all the ups and downs for both teams, it comes down to one game — the 12th between the teams this season, with San Antonio 7-4 in the previous 11.
“The one thing that we’ve learned more than anything is every game has a new life,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “Every game is earned if you want to win it. Game 7 will be no different. This is obviously a quality opponent. We have to play a lot better than we did (in Game 6), and we understand that from a number of experiences. … We’ll get some rest and recovery, learn from the tape, take the lessons from (Game 6) that are relevant for Game 7, and be ready to go out there and throw our best punch.”
History shows that’s exactly what the Thunder know how to do.
Since the start of the 2025 playoffs, Oklahoma City is 9-0 in the game immediately after a playoff loss, winning those by an average of 15.4 points. On top of that, home teams have gone 117-42 in the previous 159 instances of Game 7s in the NBA playoffs.
“We’re just a motivated group, and we accept the challenge ahead,” said Gilgeous-Alexander, a former prep standout for Chattanooga’s Hamilton Heights Christian Academy. “Every game is going to present a different challenge, and obviously when you lose, it hurts a little more and there’s a little extra motivation, and we tend to fight a little bit harder.”
And given that this is Game 7 — the fifth this year, tying the record (set in 1994 and matched in both 2014 and 2016) for a single edition of the NBA playoffs — there will be plenty of fight on both sides.
Gilgeous-Alexander will be in his fourth Game 7, Wembanyama will be in his first, and most of the rotation players for the Spurs will be on this stage for only the first or second time — but everyone knows the stakes.
“I think there’s been a lot of legendary Game 7s, and I feel like we’re a group that wants to be a part of that,” said Spurs rookie Dylan Harper, whose father — five-time NBA champion Ron Harper — played in a pair of Game 7s. “We want to be a part of that kind of history of Game 7. We’re going to go out there swinging. No matter what, we just going to leave it all on the table.”