San Antonio opens the 2026 NBA Playoffs against Portland on April 19, 2026, with Game 1 set for 8:00 PM CT at the Frost Bank Center and NBC carrying the national broadcast. WOAI 1200 AM will air the radio call as the Spurs begin a series they enter as heavy favorites.
The matchup carries more weight than a standard first-round opener because San Antonio went 62-20, won the season series 2-1 and took both regular-season games at home without Victor Wembanyama ever facing Portland in those meetings. That combination left the Spurs with a clear edge on paper even before the postseason began.
Portland arrives with a different story. The Trail Blazers changed head coaches in the second game of the season after Chauncey Billups was put on indefinite suspension by the NBA following his arrest in a federal gambling investigation, and Tiago Splitter took over despite never having been a head coach before this year. Splitter had joined Billups’s staff in June, then guided a team that improved by six games and earned its first playoff berth since 2021.
The Blazers sealed that berth with a road victory in Phoenix in the Western Conference 7/8 seed game, a result that gave them a chance to extend a season that was interrupted early and reshaped midstream. San Antonio’s own path was more straightforward, but the Spurs also return to the playoffs after seven years away and do so with expectations far beyond what most saw coming at the start of the season.
That is the friction inside this series: one team comes in with a dominant record and a home floor that has already produced two wins over Portland, while the other has survived upheaval long enough to keep playing. Game 1 will show whether San Antonio’s regular-season control carries over or whether Portland’s late-season resilience can make the bracket look less certain than it appeared when it was set.
