Victor Wembanyama is on the verge of his first Western Conference Finals, but the 22-year-old admits the moment still has not fully landed. Speaking to Stephen A. Smith, Dirk Nowitzki and Q Richardson on NBA on Prime's Premium Player segment in the hours after the San Antonio Spurs eliminated the Minnesota Timberwolves, Wembanyama tried to put words to a season that has snapped a six-year playoff drought and dropped the Spurs back into the league's final four for the first time since 2017.
"The words Conference Finals just seem surreal right now," Wembanyama said. "It's like something I heard my whole life and now we're in it and it's kind of unreal, but at the end of day it's just basketball. We know what we got to do."
That last line is becoming a Wemby trademark — wonder admitted out loud, then folded immediately into the work. The Frenchman was asked how he had watched a young Spurs roster grow inside the playoffs themselves, and his answer landed on a familiar theme: defensive joy.
"Feels like everybody's taking pleasure in executing the game plan," he said. "Personally, this series was probably the most fun I had on defense. The most fun. Like everybody was on a string. Everybody was like connected and I was about to go help somebody cuz I know my teammate has my back."
The series with Minnesota was not a clean one. Wembanyama was ejected in Game 4 after a flagrant 2 incident, and the Wolves leaned heavily on physicality and bait in the games that followed. Q Richardson pressed him on the moment, telling him he liked that Wembanyama had drawn a line in the sand. The answer was measured.
"I had to make a statement coming back," Wembanyama said. "I knew obviously what they were going to do. I knew of course this was going to be a certain narrative. But I felt like if I gave in to the physicality and the dirtiness, that would have helped them. And I knew I couldn't go over the edge again. So I had to beat them by playing basketball."
Asked about the balance between what he has called 'mature Vic' and 'angry Vic', Wembanyama smiled and described the tension in star-wars terms.
"It's hard to make him show up," he said of his more aggressive self. "I mean it comes out in the big games naturally. But it's hard to not fall to the dark side, or to the light side, whatever. I would say when it shows up it's kind of like the end of Game 3 here. Where I felt like everything was coming together for me and I felt really smooth in both physicality and the play."
The reward for surviving Minnesota is the heavyweight matchup the Spurs have been steering towards all year. San Antonio went 4-1 against the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the regular season, outscoring them by 114 points to 109 across those meetings. The Thunder, meanwhile, swept through the first two rounds 8-0 and arrive in the Conference Finals looking for revenge.
Wembanyama, for his part, refused to look that far. The same player who turned an ejection into a tactical reset is now framing the league's biggest stage as a chance to do exactly what he just did against Minnesota — execute the game plan and have fun on defense. For a Spurs team that had not played a playoff game of consequence since the Kawhi Leonard era, that may be the most useful message of all.
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*Originally published on [NBA News Global](https://nbanews.global/article/victor-wembanyama-spurs-conference-finals-prime-interview-may-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
