The Spurs are right to start three guards. Judge it in December, not on last June

San Antonio lost its opener to Oklahoma City 116-104 on Tuesday. The easy story is that the new starting lineup lost it. I think the evidence points the other way. In the roughly 12 minutes that De'Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper were on the floor together, the Spurs outscored the Thunder by about 10 points. They lost the other 36 minutes by about 22.

So my position is simple. Mitch Johnson made the right call when he started three guards next to Devin Vassell and Victor Wembanyama. He should keep it, and nobody, including Johnson, should judge it until it has played about 200 minutes.

The decision

Johnson first started the group in a preseason game against Phoenix on 14 October. Two days later he said it would start the opener. "We're planning on starting that same crew," he told ESPN, and he said he wanted his five best players to start games rather than bring one of them off the bench.

The case against it is real, and it is the reason this is a decision and not a formality. Three guards give away size, and last season the trio barely played together. ESPN counted 69 minutes for the three of them in 2025-26, 25 of those in the NBA Finals, and the Spurs were outscored by 47 points in that time. That is the number critics will quote all season.

What the opener showed

Here is what happened on Tuesday. The three started the game and the second half together. When Johnson made his first change of the third quarter, at 8:24, San Antonio had cut a 21-point halftime deficit to 70-57.

The damage came elsewhere. Oklahoma City won the second quarter 31-16, and the three guards did not share the floor for a single second of it. Johnson rotated them one or two at a time with the bench. In the 21 minutes when exactly two of the three were on the court, the Spurs were outscored by about 16.

The official plus-minus, the score difference while each player was on the floor, tells the same story. Vassell was plus-8 and Fox plus-1. Julian Champagnie was minus-24 in 30 minutes, Keldon Johnson minus-12 in 20, and Luke Kornet minus-10 in 13.

None of this was quiet guard play. Castle scored 24 with five threes, Harper 18 with five assists and Fox 14 with seven assists. Wembanyama made 1 of 13 shots and still had 13 rebounds and six blocks.

The samples are all small

I want to be careful, because I spent last week telling you to ignore the preseason scoreboard. I still mean it. A final score in October mostly measures who played.

Lineup minutes are a little different, because they only count the time the regulars were actually on the floor. Counted that way, from the play-by-play, the trio was about plus-9 in 12 minutes against Phoenix and about plus-17 in 11 minutes against Sacramento on 16 October. Add Tuesday and it is roughly 35 minutes, all ahead.

That is still a small sample. So are the 69 minutes from last season, and 25 of those came against the team that beat San Antonio for the title. Neither number settles anything. What settles it is time, and the only way to get that time is to keep starting them.

What Johnson should do

Keep the five, and play it longer. Twelve minutes together in a 48-minute game is a trial, not a plan. On Tuesday the stretches with only two of the three guards went worst of all, so splitting them up to cover the bench did not protect anything. It just moved the problem to the second quarter.

The Spurs host the Houston Rockets at Moody Center on Friday at 9:30 p.m. ET and play in Dallas on Saturday. That is two games in two nights, and the temptation on the second night will be to break the group up early.

Johnson should start Fox, Castle and Harper against the Rockets, give them more than 12 minutes together, and keep doing it until the group has around 200 minutes. If it is losing those minutes by then, change it. If it is winning them, last June's 69 minutes stop mattering.

The opener itself is in our recap of Thunder 116, Spurs 104.