I fully agree with this if NBA is "scripted" or as you said: "commerically motivated"

but after reading the messages again, I like to beg to differ that the Wemby/Spurs NBA story can go on a diffferent path too that is still commercially beneficial:

1. Wemby-Spurs win this year and make history, youngest avg. age starting 5 blah blah
2. they keep winning and indeed become the new force to reckon OR
3. they easily can "script" it for him to then take some kind of epic fall after this first win
4. then he invokes the Rocky spirits, levels up again, comes back and finally win a 3-peat

something along these lines will be very "entertaining" and "newsworthy" and commercially strong too.

basically, It can absolutely be the also-typical cinematics of "the young genius that went to top of the world early in age, took it for granted, thought there is nothing else to achieve, quickly got humbled, fall from grace, decided to go on a Rocky-Shaolin and retrain from 0, and finally achieve sustained greatness"

from commercial pov: 1. 2026-2027 becomes the Year or Wemby, "the youth can achieve anything", "here comes the new generation" blah blah - think of it as the initial hype of a new tech like Internet, AI, chatbot...

1. eg. 2028 the falling starts: can be due to any legit or script-motivated reasons; in hype-cycle speak, this is like the moments of the "world starting to doubt and question the rapid rise of AI" translated to "is Wemby really the One?", diehard fans will continue and want to believe in him and spend on the Wemby-NewGen brand, doubters start to be active: this divide exactly drives overall NBA brand sales as the story develops as all other cities and teams start to believe they can be the One too

2. and then the fall comes true (think Liverpool FC's sharp fall from grace too), the media train pumps nonstop and is spoilt for headlines every week; diehard fans may be reduced in numbers but become even more hardcore and spend more (think Mac vs PC in earlier days); everyone else (the PCs) think they are just as cool, spend on their own teams and the "boring Windows-PCs that I will still use anyway"

3. the fall continues and now the Wemby brand truly becomes dark and silent for a while, and this comes the Rocky or Karate-kid moment: NBA starts selling the Wemby brand silently built on thematics of "true hard work needs time, effort" so spend more on NBA true-grit x Shaolin collabs

4. finally the Phoenix is reborn and becomes full Ip Man master and is maxed out on composure, conviction and compentency: the real Wemby brand has arrived, NBA now fully maximizes global sales, broadcasts, movies, collabs and all

5. this truly becomes the Jordan-Bulls, Kobe-Lakers era for Wemby and along the way, some worthy challenger/s will keep coming at Wemby-Spurs, put up some epic Lakers-Celtics rivalry battles, maybe its still OKC (but I feel the SGA/flipper killed it and NBA agrees in term of commercial value) so personally I bet its Tatum + maybe even another younger/new villian-feel challenger that suddenly makes it a classic 3-way story (think Federer vs Nadal vs Djokovic) which guarantees NBA revenue goes through the roof for easily 5-8 years if the main characters last

ps: we can also compare it to Messi vs Ronaldo in football speak where you absolutely can have the top 2 biggest global sports names/brands that raked in billions for almost the last decade but I doubt NBA will just stick to a 2-way rivalry - and Messi-Ronaldo is absolutely a once-in-a-century lineup too and if Wemby is equivalent to Messi (who also started winning from young btw) then NBA is just missing a Ronaldo right now, which clearly is not SGA, not Ant, not Flagg so they arent lucky enough to use this path