De’Aaron Fox, the Spurs Guard Still Answering for One Layup in the NBA Finals

De'Aaron Fox

Photo: Bandai Namco Entertainment America / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 20, 1997 New Orleans
Occupation	Basketball Player
Individual awards	NBA All-Star · All-NBA Third Team · NBA Clutch Player of the Year · NBA steals leader · SEC tournament MVP

One reading of De’Aaron Fox’s career is a long climb with a reward at the top: the quick point guard who dragged a forgotten franchise back into the playoffs, moved to a contender and played for a championship beside the most talked-about young player in the sport. The other reading, the one replayed all summer, starts with a few seconds of open floor, a one-point lead and a shot nobody needed him to take. He opens a new season with the San Antonio Spurs carrying both.

The play was simple enough. With San Antonio ahead by a point late in the fourth game of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, Fox broke out on a runout where the expected move was to dribble out the clock. He went up for a layup instead. OG Anunoby blocked it, Jalen Brunson missed a three at the other end, and Anunoby tipped in the rebound to give the New York Knicks a one-point win, the last act of a comeback from twenty-nine points down and a three-games-to-one lead. In the fifth game, in San Antonio, the Knicks finished the job. Fox made three of his fifteen shots.

He was born in New Orleans on December 20, 1997, to Aaron Fox and Lorainne Harris-Fox, and grew up in the Houston area, where he played for Cypress Lakes High School in Cypress, Texas. His high school coach later described a teenager who was in the gym at six in the morning, every morning. As a senior he averaged 32.1 points, twice scored 50 in a game and was named a McDonald’s All-American. The nickname that followed him to the NBA, Swipa, came from Swiper the fox in Dora the Explorer and from the steals.

He picked Kentucky because, he said, “it felt like a family,” and stayed one season under John Calipari. The night that defined it came in the Sweet 16 against UCLA and Lonzo Ball, the only point guard ranked above him in his recruiting class: Fox scored 39 points. Kentucky lost to North Carolina two days later on a last-second jumper by Luke Maye, and Fox declared for the draft.

The Sacramento Kings took him fifth in 2017. They had not reached the postseason since 2006, and for years he was the best reason to watch them anyway. Speed was the selling point, and he knew it: from baseline to baseline with the ball in his hands, he said, he was “definitely the fastest person in the league.” In his second season he lifted his scoring from 11.6 to 17.3 points a game and finished runner-up to Pascal Siakam for Most Improved Player. In 2020 the Kings gave him a five-year, $163 million extension.

The payoff arrived in the 2022-23 season. Fox made his first All-Star team and the All-NBA Third Team, and became the first winner of the NBA’s Clutch Player of the Year award, voted ahead of Jimmy Butler and DeMar DeRozan. Sacramento ended its drought, and Fox scored 38 points in his playoff debut against the Golden State Warriors, a series the Kings lost in seven games. He led the league in steals the following season, and in November 2024 he scored 60 against the Minnesota Timberwolves, a franchise record, then 49 against Utah the next night. The team around him, though, had slipped back to the play-in.

In February 2025 he was traded to San Antonio in a three-team deal that sent Zach LaVine to Sacramento. He played 17 games for the Spurs before season-ending surgery on a tendon in his left little finger, an injury dating from training camp. That August, San Antonio signed him to a four-year, $229 million maximum extension that runs through the 2029-30 season.

The bet looked sound for most of the year that followed. The Spurs went 62-20, and in February, with Fox averaging 19.4 points and 6.3 assists, Commissioner Adam Silver named him to replace the injured Giannis Antetokounmpo in the All-Star Game, his second selection. His role had changed. Next to Victor Wembanyama, and with Stephon Castle and the rookie Dylan Harper taking more of the ball, Fox was less the engine than the veteran who closed games. San Antonio beat Minnesota in the second round and Oklahoma City in seven games to reach its first Finals since 2014.

The verdict after June was harsh and arithmetic. Fox averaged 12.8 points in the Finals on 34.4 percent shooting and 25 percent from three, numbers that critics set beside the contract and compared, for the layup, with J.R. Smith’s lapse in the 2018 Finals. What got less attention at the time was his ankle. In an interview with Andscape’s Marc J. Spears this autumn, Fox said he had suffered a high ankle sprain in Game 4 of the Minnesota series, an injury that usually takes four to six weeks, and kept playing. “Why did I play? I felt like I could help the team,” he said. That does not explain the layup. It does weaken the idea that he simply shrank, and it sharpens the question San Antonio actually faces: whether a 28-year-old guard built on speed fits a roster whose timeline belongs to Wembanyama, Castle and Harper. Trade speculation followed him through the offseason; none of it has been reported as more than talk.

Away from the court he has been married since August 2022 to Recee Caldwell, with whom he has a son, Reign, born in February 2023. In 2023 he became the first signature athlete of Curry Brand, Stephen Curry’s label, and he has never hidden his attachment to Dragon Ball Z, whose Vegeta he names as his favourite character.

The new season began with small alarms. Fox missed the first preseason games with soreness and what coach Mitch Johnson called “general tightness in his hip,” then returned for a win over Phoenix. For the opener against Oklahoma City, a rematch of the conference finals, Johnson set him in a three-guard starting lineup with Castle and Harper, beside Devin Vassell and Wembanyama. Fox’s own read of that group was telling. “A lot of how special that first group can be,” he said, “it’s going to be predicated on how we shoot the ball.” For a guard whose three-point shot has been the open question of his whole career, that is a frank thing to say out loud, and the next eight months will decide which version of the Finals story stays attached to his name.

Tags: sports, athletes, nba, basketball players, San Antonio Spurs, Victor Wembanyama, De'Aaron Fox