Spurs v. Knicks: Sore Winners, Sore Losers, and Why People Finger-Point
What a brutal NBA Finals loss is teaching me about how people handle defeat — on the court, and in a marriage.
I am a Spurs fan. I raised my kids in San Antonio for twenty-five years, and that city gets into your blood, turning it into what I imagine to be the most luscious homemade Mexican hot sauce. In SA, spicy is good, and there is no city like it. So let me tell you where I am sitting this morning, following a shocking Spurs defeat by the New York Knicks last night, and then you can tell me how you feel, because I sincerely want to know.
The Spurs are down 3–1 in the Finals. One more Knicks win, and it is over. And last night was the kind of loss that does not just sting. It haunts.
Spurs led almost the whole game. At one point, we were up by nearly thirty. Thirty. And then, in the final ten seconds, it was gone. Knicks 107, Spurs 106. A one-point knife to the ribs after a night that felt like it might be a coronation. Our team choked, and Spurs fans woke up in shock today. Not disappointed. Shock.
I want to talk about why. Not the box score — plenty of people will dissect the box score. I want to talk about the psychology of it all, because I have spent my career in rooms watching human beings handle loss, blame, and the threat to their identity. And I am telling you: a basketball series is just a low-stakes laboratory for the exact behavior I see in couples on the edge of divorce.
Why This One Hurt More Than a Blowout
Here is the first thing worth understanding. A close, ugly collapse hurts far more than a clean beating. If the Spurs had lost by thirty, fans would be angry. Instead, they lost by one after leading by thirty, and fans are devastated. There is a reason for that, and it is not weakness.
When you are up by thirty, your brain quietly builds a model of a won game. It starts treating the victory as if you already own it. Sitting on the couch last night, my husband and I relaxed and even thanked the Spurs for not scaring us half to death with a skin-thin win, as our other favorite team does, the Arkansas Razorback football team, though when they take us to the edge of what is tolerable, they almost always lose.
So, when the comfortable lead slips away, the mind does not register it as “we failed to win.” It registers it as “we had it, and it was taken.” Losing something you believe you already possess is one of the most painful experiences a human being can have. We are wired to feel a loss far more sharply than an equivalent gain.
This is why the snatched-away ending produces grief, not just frustration. And it is the same reason a marriage that dies slowly, after years of believing it was solid, can level a person in a way they never saw coming. You do not just lose the thing. You lose the version of the future you had already moved into.
The Sore Winner and the Sore Loser Are the Same Wound
Now to the part that has been hard to watch. After the Spurs took Game 3 in New York, angry Knicks fans ganged up on a man in a Spurs jersey on the streets of New York. They put their hands on him, surrounded him with dozens of young people, and tried to rip his jersey off. I am sure he was terrified.
Knicks fans have spent the series insisting the league protected our star, Victor Wembanyama — a 22-year-old kid from France, or outer space, depending on who you’re talking to — calling him a coddled baby. They blame the officiating even while they are winning.
Sit with that for a second. They are winning, and they still need a villain. That tells you everything.
Triumph that requires humiliating the other side is not confidence. It is anxiety wearing a costume. A secure winner does not need you to feel small in order to feel big. The need to dominate, to degrade, to grind the loser into the pavement — that comes from a part of a person that does not quite believe the win is real or deserved. So, they keep reaching for proof, and the proof they reach for is your humiliation.
I have watched this exact thing play out in divorce after divorce. The spouse who “won” — got the house, got the kids, got the sympathy, or whatever the couple was fighting over — and still cannot stop attacking. No matter how much flesh was extracted in the legal battle, the ex still needs to be the monster, and the bully still needs a win. People assume cruelty comes from strength. It almost never does. It comes from a fragile place that has not been soothed. The sore winner and the sore loser are not opposites. They are the same wound, just at different points on the scoreboard.
Scapegoating Wemby Is the Oldest Trick in the Human Playbook
Watch how quickly the conversation found a target. Not “the Spurs are playing well.” Instead, Wembanyama is spoiled, the league babies him, and the refs protect him. Clip after clip of him being aggressive — “How dare he!!” — with no mention that the other guy threw the first elbow or had grabbed a half-yard of jersey in his fist.
This is externalization, and it is doing a job. The truer explanation — the other team is simply good, and sometimes you lose to good, or someone who on that day happened to be better than you — is intolerable, so the mind builds a villain instead. A villain is easier than a mirror. And notice the bonus: nothing unites a crowd like a shared enemy. Scapegoating is social glue. It lets a group feel righteous and connected without anyone having to look at themselves.
There is an uglier layer, too. The chosen scapegoat is often someone already easy to other — you know, when we other someone, we are saying he isn’t one of us, and we mean it in a derogatory sense. The foreigner, the outsider, the one who is different. The French kid who is “spoiled.”
“Did you see how Wemby acted during the national anthem — he’s anti-American!” was literally all over social media, and a sports hero to demonize was born.
I’ve written many times about how talented and gifted people will be ripped down by the mob, who, like Antonio Salieri, the composer who wrote music in Vienna in the same era as Mozart, could not handle not having the same easy music-writing gifts that Mozart had. It’s a problem many thousands of years in the making.
Although the Knicks have basketball savants themselves, they can’t bear that the Spurs were gifted with the soon-to-be legendary Wemby, so Wemby must be fed to the rabid dogs.
That is not an accident. We tend to blame whoever is least like us because it costs us the least.
In my office, the scapegoat is rarely a basketball player. It is the in-laws. The therapist. The ex. The job. The kids. Anyone but the dynamic in the room. And here is the cost: as long as the problem lives out there, you never have to change anything in here. Externalizing feels like relief. It is actually a trap.
“The Refs Robbed Us” Is a Story About Control
The officiating complaints deserve their own mention, because they are not really about officiating. Blaming the refs is a locus-of-control move. If an outside force decided the outcome, then your team did not fail, you did not misjudge anything, and nothing is asked of you. It protects the ego perfectly. It also guarantees you learn nothing.
When a result feels random and beyond our control, some people reach for superstition — the jinx, the curse, the negative energy, the unwanted political guest brought bad mojo into the building. It is magical thinking, and human beings lean on it hardest when they feel helpless. It is comforting. It is also a way of refusing to look at what was actually in our control.
The relationship version is everywhere. “The system is rigged against me.” “My lawyer blew it.” “If only he had behaved, none of this would have happened.” Maybe some of that is even partly true. But a person who can only locate the cause outside themselves is a person who can never grow, because growth requires owning the one variable you can actually move — you.
So, What Do We Spurs Fans Do With a 3–1 Hole?
Here is where I turn it back on my own people, because Spurs fans are about to be tested, too. Down 3–1, facing elimination, there are two roads. One is the Knicks fan way — catastrophizing and blaming the refs, the curse, the coddling, the everything. The other is harder and better: sit in the disappointment without lying about it, give the other team their due, and keep your eyes on the one game in front of you.
Can’t we all just act like adults?
That is not just sports advice. That is the whole game of being a grown-up. You will lose things you believed you owned. People will be cruel when they win and bitter when they lose. The world will hand you plenty of villains to blame. None of it asks anything of your character. What asks something of your character is the quiet, unglamorous work of taking responsibility for your part and refusing to make someone else small so you can feel big.
The Spurs may win Saturday, or they may not. But how a person handles the loss tells you more about who they are than the win ever could. That is true on the court. It is even more true at the kitchen table, in the lawyer’s office, in a marriage that is hanging by a thread.
Watch how people behave when the scoreboard turns against them. It is the most honest thing they will ever show you.
WORKING WITH ME
I’m Dr. Becky Whetstone, a licensed marriage and family therapist and America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®. I’ve spent nearly 30 years with people at the worst moment of their marriage.
I work with clients everywhere by Zoom. If something in this post hit close to home, here’s where to start.
My book: I (Think)I Want Out: What to Do When One of You Wants to End Your Marriage — Read the whole framework, in order, at your own pace.
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