San Antonio (Mexico) (AFP) – San Antonio star Victor Wembanyama says there’s no need for heroics as the Spurs aim to battle back from a deflating loss to the New York Knicks in the opening game of the NBA Finals. The Spurs squandered a 14-point second-half lead on their home floor to drop game one on Wednesday. But Wembanyama insisted on Thursday that they could turn things around in the best-of-seven series simply by getting back to their “normal” game.
“Really I think the reason we lost that game isn’t even technical,” Wembanyama said. “We need to approach the game with a better mental state. We just need to play our game. We just need to be normal. We don’t need to do anything incredible.” By “normal,” Wembanyama said, he meant the kind of attention to detail and collective effort that helped the Spurs build the second-best regular-season record and eventually polish off the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in seven games in the Western Conference finals.
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“‘Normal’ means trusting each other, trusting the basketball gods, trusting the game plan, executing, and not relying on talent so much to make shots or to save the day. We’ve been playing a certain way all season. We’ve been successful this way. There’s no reason to change the day the Finals start.”
That doesn’t mean Wembanyama, a Most Valuable Player finalist and Defensive Player of the Year, won’t be aiming to improve after connecting on just six of 21 shots on the way to 26 points on Wednesday, a performance he judged as “bad”.
Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said he’ll be looking for better shot selection, and the extra pass from his players, who were pushed into some poor decisions by a stout Knicks defense. “Sixteen assists is not a reflection of this program ever since I’ve been here, and decades before I was,” he said. “I think the way we played offensively in terms of a team and our brand, we didn’t play with the pass enough, we didn’t put enough pressure, force the rim in the paint. It led to a lot of making or missing shots, us trying to play with talent offensively instead of playing together and finding opportunities to take advantage of forcing defenses to (make) decisions of giving up this or giving up that.”
“New York gets a lot of credit for that,” Johnson added.
© 2024 AFP
