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The San Antonio Spurs are going to the NBA Finals after knocking out the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder with a dramatic 111-103 win in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals on Saturday night. This is the Spurs’ first Finals appearance since 2014 and the first for Victor Wembanyama.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Spurs will face the New York Knicks in the 2026 NBA Finals, which begin on Wednesday in San Antonio. That series will be a rematch of the 1999 Finals, which the Spurs won in five games.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Saturday, the Spurs jumped out to an early double-digit lead and controlled the majority of the game, but the Thunder kept making comebacks. Twice, the Thunder even took the lead, and seemed to have the Spurs on the ropes. But time and again, the Spurs showed incredible poise to regain their advantage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wembanyama, named Western Conference Finals MVP, had a team-high 22 points and hit three 3-pointers in Game 7, and seven different Spurs players scored in double figures. Julian Champganie hit six 3s en route to a 20-point night, while Stephon Castle added 16 points, six rebounds and six assists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had a game-high 35 points on 12-of-21 shooting, but the rest of the Thunder starters combined for 31 points, and 17 of them came from Cason Wallace. Notably, Chet Holmgren finished with just four points, going 1 for 2 from the field and did not take a shot in the second half.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The play of the game came late in the fourth quarter when Luke Kornet, who only played six minutes, came up with an incredible chasedown block on Isaiah Hartenstein to halt the Thunder’s momentum. With just over six minutes to play, the Spurs were clinging to a six-point lead with Wembanyama on the bench due to foul trouble.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hartenstein picked off a pass, took off on a fast break and looked like he was going to throw down a slam to cut the deficit to four. Instead, Kornet came out of nowhere to reject him at the rim. Down on the other end, Stephon Castle scored, which began a 7-0 run that put the Spurs back up by double digits. While the Thunder kept fighting, they never truly recovered from that play.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Spurs are searching for their first NBA championship since 2014, when they took down the Heat, and their sixth title overall. They are currently fifth all-time, behind the Boston Celtics (18), Los Angeles Lakers (17), Golden State Warriors (seven) and Chicago Bulls (six). A victory would move the Spurs into a tie with the Bulls. The first of the Spurs’ titles came in 1999… against the Knicks.<\/p>\n
Saturday’s result also means the NBA will have its eighth different champion in eight seasons. The league has not had a back-to-back winner since the Warriors in 2017 and 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This page may contain affiliate links. If you click and sign up, make a deposit, or place a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":705674,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,23657,5548,10549,85,24942,343337,191447,67100],"class_list":["post-705673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-okc-thunder","tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","tag-san-antonio-spurs","tag-sports","tag-spurs","tag-spurs-nba-finals","tag-spurs-vs-thunder","tag-western-conference-finals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=705673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/705674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=705673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=705673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=705673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}