The story of the present day San Antonio Spurs — an effort to recapture the championship-caliber greatness marking their five-ring run from 1999-2014 — will be written by Victor Wembanyama, the 21-year-old French phenom oozing with all-time upside. As they’ve marched toward a 19-7 record, though, the first two months of 2025-26 have been written by their three-pronged attack at guard in De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper.
With Wembanyama sidelined from Nov. 16 to Dec. 10, the Spurs went 9-3, including victories over the Atlanta Hawks, Denver Nuggets, Orlando Magic and Los Angeles Lakers. While Harper and Castle both missed chunks of that stretch, all three were instrumental in San Antonio’s ability to stay afloat without its 7-foot-4 life raft and have proven vital in the group’s splendid opening stanza of the season.
Rarely do the Spurs take the court without any of them (just 77 non-garbage time minutes this season, likely influenced by overlapping injuries). Among the six iterations they’ve trotted out — all three are yet to play together, which helps ensure one is almost always out there — San Antonio is a net positive with every single lineup. And ideally, more time spent alongside Wembanyama boosts the mostly good-to-decent-not-great net ratings across the board.
The Spurs are consistently winning minutes whenever 1 or 2 of their 3 excellent guards are on the floor. pic.twitter.com/bFBE7pzEDD
— Sportscasting NBA (@SportcastingNBA) December 19, 2025
A Star Scorer
Fox is the headliner here, with a chance to nab his second career All-Star berth, despite a loaded Western Conference field. After missing the first eight games of the year, the 27-year-old has been sensational. He’s averaging 22.9 points (60.3 percent true shooting), 6.0 assists, 3.6 rebounds and 1.5 steals while shooting a career-best 38.6 percent from deep on a career-high .381 3-point rate. His true shooting clip is a career-high 2.3 points above the league average.
Nearly a decade ago, Fox entered the NBA as its next great speedster. Those blazing wheels remain but they’re now accompanied by sagacious poise and an improved jumper, the latter of which has blossomed to soaring heights thus far in 2025-26. Only 15 players are hoisting more than his 8.6 pull-up jumpers game and his 54.2 effective field goal percentage on those looks ranks seventh among 69 peers averaging at least four attempts per game.
He’s shooting 41.3 percent on pull-up triples and 46.8 percent on pull-up pursuits inside the arc. Blending speed, delicate footwork and sprightly flexibility, he dances into off-balance leaners, karaokes into step-back jacks or wiggles into rhythmic off-the-bounce bombs. He’s the engine of the Spurs’ eighth-ranked half-court offense (sixth since Fox’s debut Nov. 8, per Cleaning the Glass), mixing in 14.2 drives per game (19th league-wide) to provide a level of versatile shot-making neither of the other guards can replicate.
Drive, Drive, Drive
Whereas Fox offers this carousel of creators varying scoring speeds, Castle and Harper are unrelenting drivers with a second home at the hoop. According to Cleaning the Glass, Harper’s 55 percent rim frequency ranks in the 98th percentile among combo guards while Castle’s 43 percent rate places him in the 91st percentile.
Castle isn’t far behind Fox in drives per game at 13.6 (21st league-wide), with Harper sitting 51st at 10.4, despite averaging just 21.9 minutes a night. Harper and Castle, however, operate different cars to arrive at the same destination inside.
The second-year wing marries strength, ball-screen guile and deceleration to reach the rim. When he gets there, he’s shooting 69 percent (75th percentile), leveraging his power, footwork, vertical explosion and finishing creativity to convert through or around defenders.
A 6-foot-6 guard who moves like this, with these physical traits, is an absolute pain to contain. He flashed as much en route to winning Rookie of the Year in 2024-25 and has returned increasingly polished (the handle and dribble moves, whew!) to drive more often and do so more fruitfully. If he’s not scoring, he’s probably drawing a foul. His 9.8 free throws per 100 possessions ranks in the 98th percentile (per databallr).
Harper isn’t as proficient of a finisher (yet!) but looks to be a similarly devastating downhill dasher. Although his 60 percent clip at the rim is only in the 33rd percentile, he’s a cunning, intrepid driver. Generating 1.2 points per possession on a shot composing 55 percent of one’s field goals is mighty serviceable, especially when 75 percent of those attempts are unassisted (highest rate among all Spurs).
He rarely takes rounded, inefficient routes to the basket, possessing an uncanny knack for swiftly changing direction without straying from his North-South path. He finds space for advantages while maintaining the tangent. For most players, it is hard to create space in congested areas without deviating from the cleanest path to the hoop. Harper rejects that notion, wielding the elasticity to enjoy the best of both worlds. His defenders presumably wish he didn’t.
High-Level Playmaking
Harper and Castle extend their paint-oriented ways into table-setting for San Antonio’s plethora of cutters and rollers. Excluding Castle, six different Spurs are shooting 67 percent or better around the basket. Even without Wembanyama for 12 games, they’re eighth overall in rim frequency. These two playmakers are a massive reason why.
According to databallr, Castle’s 4.5 at-rim assists per 100 possessions rank in the 92nd percentile and Harper’s 1.8 sit in the 70th percentile. Castle’s size, cadence and individual finishing prowess consistently spring loose opportunities while Harper’s general passing savvy keeps his options aplenty.
Despite the early, wide-ranging excellence of all three guards, questions helping determine San Antonio’s immediate ceiling remain. Castle’s 18.4 percent turnover rate, stemming from decision-making and ball-handling woes, is the worst in the league, per Cleaning the Glass. His driving and playmaking are immensely valuable but he chops himself down with every errant pass and wobbly dribbling sequence.
Harper’s 55 percent rim frequency speaks largely to his superb slashing but also to the lack of a reliable intermediate game or outside jumper. He’s shooting just 34.9 percent on any field goal away from the rim. Can he broaden his scoring toolkit to become less of a one-trick pony? With his physical gifts, does he have to? A bump from 60 percent finishing would certainly help quell some worries and make him a better scorer.
Fox’s torrid 3-point shooting this year is well above his career 33.3 percent clip. If that crashes back to earth, can he tweak the jumper-happy approach to mitigate the slide and still be lethal? He’s been so necessary as a scorer that any falloff may spell doom for San Antonio’s half-court attack — at least from a playoff perspective.
Really, though, these hurdles are magnified by framing the Fox-Castle-Harper trio as a forward-looking centerpiece rather than a stupendous nucleus around Wembanyama. Their limitations become less pressing and less central to San Antonio’s ceiling with a fully healthy, up-to-speed Wembanyama, who is still developing in his own right and could blossom into much more than “only” a top-five player.
This Spurs story runs through him, no matter how wonderfully the first few chapters of 2025-26 are penned — courtesy of San Antonio’s dynamic, star-laden guard room.
