Stephon Castle starred as the San Antonio Spurs sealed their spot in the Western Conference finals with a convincing 139-109 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves.<\/p>\n
Castle led the way with 32 points, while Victor Wembanyama added 19, as the Spurs clinched the series 4-2 to set up a heavyweight match-up against the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder.<\/p>\n
The Spurs met the Thunder – the reigning NBA champions – five times during the regular season and finished with a 4-1 record against them.<\/p>\n
Repeating that over the seven-game Western finals would earn the Spurs a spot in the NBA finals.<\/p>\n
“We’re not even thinking about that right now,” Castle said after Friday’s victory over the Timberwolves. <\/p>\n
“The games ahead are a totally different game. They are rolling right now. They’ve won eight straight. <\/p>\n
“It’s going to be tough to knock them off, but we’re pretty confident we can do it.”<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, the Detroit Pistons beat the Cleveland Cavaliers 115-94 to tie their series and set up a deciding game seven .<\/p>\n
Cade Cunningham scored 21 points, while Paul Reed and Jalen Duren added 17 and 15 respectively, as the top-seeded Pistons forced a decider for the second play-off round in a row.<\/p>\n
Detroit had trailed 3-1 to Orlando Magic in the previous round before reeling off three straight wins to take the series 4-3.<\/p>\n
The Pistons host the Cavaliers in Detroit on Sunday to decide who will face the New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stephon Castle starred as the San Antonio Spurs sealed their spot in the Western Conference finals with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-646378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}