San Antonio Spurs coach Mitch Johnson explained his decision to bench Dylan Harper down the stretch of Wednesday’s Game 1 of the NBA Finals after conceding a 105-95 loss to the New York Knicks.<\/p>\n
“Dylan had a heck of a game, and he was playing very well… Dylan did not finish the game by nothing that he did or did not do,” Johnson said about Harper on Thursday. <\/p>\n
“It was a decision I made. I understand that there would be logic in having Dylan in that group, but I thought that group that was out there did some things during the stretch, and that’s who I rolled with.”<\/p>\n
The Knicks closed out the game by going on a 11-0 run after Harper was subbed out with 4:04 remaining in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n
Harper had been one of the Spurs’ most efficient players through the first three quarters of Game 1. He contributed 16 points on 6-for-10 shooting from the field while adding eight rebounds and an assist off the bench.<\/p>\n
Harper’s assist was one of just 16 total recorded Wednesday by the Spurs, who had averaged 25.1 assists per playoff game heading into the Finals.<\/p>\n
Like De’Aaron<\/a> Fox<\/a>, Johnson cited that stat as something the Spurs needed to improve in Game 2.<\/p>\n “Sixteen assists is not a reflection of this program, ever since I’ve been here, decades before I was,” Johnson said Thursday. “We can be much sharper on just a lot of game-plan execution stuff.”<\/p>\n Johnson added: “I think there’s a lot of things we can control that are much more approach, game-plan execution driven, that we can improve upon before you even get to, ‘What did this guy shoot from the field?'”<\/p>\n Sixth Man of the Year Keldon Johnson also saw just eight minutes on the court in Wednesday’s loss.<\/p>\n Mitch Johnson has one day to decide whether he should change his approach before the Spurs are back at it for Game 2 on Friday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Antonio Spurs coach Mitch Johnson explained his decision to bench Dylan Harper down the stretch of Wednesday’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-715801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715801","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=715801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}