[Hollinger] Against Wembanyama, two minutes into the first game of this series, the 64-win, defending champion Thunder realized that one of their elite performers was unplayable… Hartenstein didn’t play one second on offense against Wembanyama the rest of the game.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7290616/2026/05/19/victor-wembanyama-spurs-thunder-game-1/
First, the start. Nobody seems to be talking about this, but two minutes into the game, something amazing happened: The Thunder sent Alex Caruso to the scorer’s table to replace Isaiah Hartenstein. Hartenstein, if you’ll recall, was the Thunder’s key free-agent acquisition in the summer of 2024 that turned them into NBA champions. By my metrics, he is a $32 million player who rates as one of the league’s top 15 centers.
Against Wembanyama, two minutes into the first game of this series, the 64-win, defending champion Thunder realized that one of their elite performers was unplayable. Hartenstein can do a lot of things, but he can’t space the floor, and — as the Minnesota Timberwolves and Portland Trail Blazers already found out — that is basically fatal for a big man playing against Wembanyama, who will just sit in the paint and destroy an entire offense by himself.
It took them two minutes Monday night, but the Thunder knew this was probably the case even before the game started.
“I think it was pretty clear that that was the plan going in,” Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault said, “was to get (Hartenstein) staggered pretty quickly, to get Caruso in there. And we kind of predetermined that. I didn’t know how quick I would do it.”
Hartenstein didn’t play one second on offense against Wembanyama the rest of the game. The Thunder only played him when backup center Luke Kornet checked in — a total of 10 minutes the rest of the night — because those were the only stretches that permitted Hartenstein to be a normal center. The Thunder started the second half with Cason Wallace in Hartenstein’s place, and one imagines that’s how they’ll start Game 2 as well.
San Antonio finished with a 36.8 percent offensive rebound rate, compared to just 21 percent for the Thunder, per NBA.com.