San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama looks on during the first half of Game 4 in the Western Conference finals NBA playoffs series against the Oklahoma City Thunder in San Antonio, Sunday. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

It’s like Victor Wembanyama has been here before.

Dec. 28, 2024, was a cold and drizzly morning in New York. Wembanyama had some spare time before the San Antonio Spurs’ charter flight would leave for Minnesota that afternoon, so he posted a message on social media: Come meet me in Washington Square Park to play chess, he wrote.

He played four games that morning: two wins, two losses.

Fast forward to now, where the Spurs and Oklahoma City are playing a different form of chess — the Western Conference finals, with Game 5 set for Tuesday night on the Thunder’s home floor. The score to this point, just like that morning in New York: two wins, two losses.

Spurs coach Mitch Johnson and Thunder coach Mark Daigneault have both likened the back-and-forth of this series to a chess match, where outthinking one’s opponent is just as important as outplaying them. And Wembanyama, who often travels with his own chess set, appreciates that parallel.

“There’s definitely similarities, as in any strategy game,” Wembanyama said after San Antonio’s series-tying 103-82 romp on Sunday night. “It’s fun. It’s very fun. In the playoffs at some point, especially when a series drags on, everybody knows the other team almost by heart. … I would say the coaches hold a lot of this load of the chess match, the coaching staff, all the strategy, it’s a lot.”

Nobody is in position to declare “checkmate” quite yet: San Antonio took Game 1, Oklahoma City took Games 2 and 3, the Spurs won Game 4. The combined numbers to this point: the Spurs have outscored the Thunder 446-442, the Spurs are shooting 43%, the Thunder are shooting 42%. Not every game has been close — the Thunder won Game 3 by 15, the Spurs won Game 4 by 21 — but the series, as a whole, couldn’t be too much closer.

“The series is 2-2 and basically zero-zero and it’s first to two games now,” Thunder guard and two-time reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. “I mean, it’s not at the front of our mind, but it is a fact and it is the reality of where we are.”

These two franchises splitting the first four games in the West finals should have been expected. They also met in the 2012 and 2014 West title matchups — and both of those series also were tied at 2-2 through four games, with the Thunder eventually winning in 2012 and the Spurs eventually winning in 2014.