Pairing an expensive veteran with rising star Dylan Harper has created a championship-caliber backcourt logjam, leaving San Antonio trapped between immediate title hopes and a restricted future.
When you look at what the San Antonio Spurs gave up to acquire De'Aaron Fox back in February 2025, the deal was a no-brainer.
The Spurs were adding a 27-year-old veteran All-Star point guard to run San Antonio's offense alongside Victor Wembanyama and a rookie Stephon Castle.
Fox would sign a four-year, $229 million maximum contract extension in the summer thaty followed.
At the time — the Spurs obviously won the trade.
But does that still hold true ahead of the 2026-27 NBA season?
Since stealing Fox from the Sacramento Kings, San Antonio added an elite (borderline-generational) guard prospect in Dylan Harper after lucking into the second pick in the 2025 NBA Draft and got to witness how he and Fox performed in a championship setting.
Harper had potentially the best NBA Finals showing from a rookie since Magic Johnson in 1980 ... while Fox was one of the biggest reasons that the Spurs collapsed late in games against the New York Knicks time and again.
And since San Antonio handed Fox a maximum contract, he's essentially untradeable.
Castle can't come off the floor and Mitch Johnson can't deploy all three guards together in the same lineup, so it seems Harper will be relegated to a sixth-man role yet again.
That's where one could argue that the Spurs actually lost the Fox trade.
The Kings were exactly .500 at the time of the trade, far removed from the magical "Light the Beam" run the franchise experienced in 2022-23. It was time to blow things up.
Over a year later, Sacramento now has another exciting guard from the John Calipari tree in Darius Acuff as it attempts to rebuild yet again.
Meanwhile, the Spurs have a budding superstar they have to bring off the bench and a proven liability on basketball's grandest stage that also carries an average annual value (AAV) of $55.4 million — which ranked as the fourth-worst contract in the NBA according to Bleacher Report.
Now, San Antonio never could've prepared for the possibility of gaining the second pick in one of the most stacked classes in recent memory — so I'm not saying this is necessarily the front office's fault.
But giving the Spurs grace doesn't rectify the troubling position they're in. Fox is too expensive, has no trade value and is preventing what may be San Antonio's second-most promising player on the roster from capturing a larger role.
The irony is impossible to ignore: the move that helped get San Antonio to its first NBA Finals in 12 years could eventually end up standing in the way of its next trip there.
