Victor Wembanyama had 40 points and 13 rebounds in his 65th game to become eligible for NBA awards, and the San Antonio Spurs beat the Dallas Mavericks 139-120 on Friday night.<\/p>\n
De’Aaron Fox had 18 points and 10 assists and Keldon Johnson had 17 points for San Antonio.<\/p>\n
Rookie Cooper Flagg had 33 points, six rebounds and five assists for Dallas, which has lost 11 of 13.<\/p>\n
After opening the season with a 40-point game against Dallas, Wembanyama reached 40 for the fifth time in what could be his regular-season finale.<\/p>\n
The NBA requires a minimum of 65 games played to be eligible for season-long awards and Wembanyama got there in San Antonio’s penultimate game.<\/p>\n
The 7-foot-4 Wembanyama, who leads the league with 197 blocks, is favored to win Defensive Player of the Year, according to BetMGM Sportsbook.<\/p>\n
He missed Wednesday\u2019s 112-101 victory over Portland after suffering a left rib contusion during the first half of Monday\u2019s 115-102 win over Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
Wembanyama quickly showed he was fine by stepping through three defenders to throw down a right-handed dunk to open the scoring. He added another dunk and a step-back 3-pointer while scoring 16 points in the opening period.<\/p>\n
The Spurs won the Southwest Division for the first time since 2017 and have secured the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference. San Antonio opens the postseason against a team that makes it through the play-in tournament \u2014 either Phoenix, the Los Angeles Clippers or Portland.<\/p>\n
San Antonio closes its regular season at home Sunday against Denver.<\/p>\n
Spurs guard Stephon Castle remains out with left foot soreness. Coach Mitch Johnson said Castle is close to returning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Victor Wembanyama had 40 points and 13 rebounds in his 65th game to become eligible for NBA awards,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,2582,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-244631","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-dallas","9":"tag-dallas-headlines","10":"tag-dallas-mavericks","11":"tag-dallas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}