Victor Wembanyama took the Spurs to Paris, trained with a rugby club and set a No. 1 seed goal

SAN ANTONIO — Oct. 14, 2026 — Victor Wembanyama did not spend the shortest offseason of his career resting. After the San Antonio Spurs lost the NBA Finals 4-1 to the New York Knicks, the 22-year-old center went back to Hakeem Olajuwon for a second straight summer, trained with a French rugby club to sharpen his balance, and in August brought a group of teammates to Paris to show them where his career started.

Details of that summer came out this week in a long feature by Michael C. Wright on how the Spurs are handling the expectations that followed a 28-win improvement and the franchise’s first Finals trip in 12 seasons.

Back to Nanterre

In Paris, the Spurs worked out at Palais des Sports Maurice Thorez, the gym where Wembanyama began his professional career as a teenager with Nanterre 92. He described the visit as touching, even emotional.

“They were willing to make this trip, and they were also curious about what I wanted to show them. So it matters because these people matter to me. This place matters to me. Having the two of them together is kind of the same as when family comes to visit here.”

The trip was not only about basketball. The group shared several dinners, including one on a riverboat on the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Harrison Barnes set up a tour of the Louvre for his teammates, and Carter Bryant and his girlfriend biked 32 miles in a single day.

Wembanyama also took Barnes with him to train with a French rugby club, where the 7-foot-4 center said he worked on his balance — an unusual addition to a summer program that already included footwork sessions with Olajuwon.

Some of it has carried over to the arena. Before the Spurs’ preseason game against Phoenix on Oct. 10, Wembanyama was filmed running rugby-style moves against the padded basket stanchion during warmups.

Victor Wembanyama puts some rugby moves on the stanchion before the game tonight vs. the Phoenix Suns. pic.twitter.com/cV381kLjUo

— MrBuckBuck (@MrBuckBuckNBA) October 11, 2026

What his teammates saw

Bryant, who sat next to Wembanyama on team flights as a rookie talking through personal and team goals, said seeing him in his hometown setting left an impression.

“[It was big] for us to take the time out of our summers after we had been together longer than anybody, then come to his home and for him to educate us about where he’s from, [to] just be around him in his element. For him to get to that point and come back to where he started and then have the people around him that are like, ‘Yo, next year we’re going to take that next step.’ Not too many people get that experience.”

The summer work did not stop with Paris. Wembanyama and several teammates, including free-agent addition Tobias Harris, also visited De’Aaron Fox for workouts at his home gym outside Houston.

“We had a long season, but you don’t want to go the entire summer without being able to be around your teammates and getting in the gym together. Just being able to be around each other, I think, is big. We have a group of guys that like being around each other.” — De’Aaron Fox

The No. 1 seed goal

Wembanyama was also the only Spur at September’s media day to talk openly about specific targets for this season. He said the Finals loss was the best motivation he could imagine.

“We have some goals between us that we’re going to keep between us as teammates. We won the West last year. We don’t want to do anything less this year. We want to be the first seed, and then we want to keep fighting for this top spot.”

The rest of the locker room has kept its answers closer to the vest. Stephon Castle said the team has “a lot of clarity on why we feel like we lost and what we can do to get better,” without saying what that is. Wembanyama’s own explanation on the night the Knicks celebrated was that San Antonio held double-digit leads in every game of the series and kept giving them away: “[All] five games this series had the same scenario. [It was surprising] how relentless we were in our mistakes, and [how] they were in punishing them.”

Devin Vassell put the approach in the simplest terms: “You can’t skip a day. You can’t skip training camp. You can’t skip the preseason. You can’t skip opening night… Nothing is guaranteed.”

Wembanyama enters the season as the reigning Defensive Player of the Year — the youngest winner and the first unanimous one — after finishing third in MVP voting. He was cleared to return for Wednesday’s preseason game against Phoenix, one of the last tune-ups before the Spurs start chasing that top seed for real.