Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals was supposed to be the Thunder's coronation moment. Instead it turned into a coming-of-age party for the Spurs, and a rough night for the guy who was supposed to be OKC's frontcourt answer to Victor Wembanyama. Chet Holmgren got cooked. The Picks Central crew didn't dance around it.
The podcast take: Spurs grew up in real time while Chet pulled an all-time disappearing act.
That's the headline. A Game 7 in the conference finals is the kind of night that defines guys for the next decade, and Holmgren reportedly looked like a player who didn't want the smoke. PMT piled on with their patented one-liner — the kind of clean kill shot that only works when everybody watching already agreed.
Big Cat and PFT, in-studio, deliver the verdict on Chet's WCF showing.
Meanwhile the Spurs are the story nobody had on their bingo card a year ago. Wemby is Wemby, sure, but you don't survive a Game 7 in OKC on one guy. The whole roster grew up at once, and now they're the ones cashing the Finals ticket. Which, in this NBA, is half the battle. Picks Central's bigger point is the one that actually matters: this league is a coin flip from round to round.
The parity sermon — even loaded teams keep getting bounced before June.
Parity is the through-line of the entire 2026 postseason. Top seeds keep getting clipped, role players keep deciding series, and the team that just survives the gauntlet ends up holding the trophy. The Spurs took the long road, took OKC's best punch, and walked out of the West. The fallout is going to be a fun couple of news cycles — including the joke version, where Spurs celebrations have already been repurposed as the universal reaction GIF.
PMT swipes the Spurs' celebration clip and slaps it on the Myles Garrett-to-Rams news as the all-purpose hype meme.
That's how you know a moment hit — within hours the footage is already detached from its original context and living rent-free as a meme template. The Spurs are going to the Finals, Chet's got a long summer of tape to watch, and the league's era of parity claims another would-be dynasty. Buckle up.