NEW YORK (AP) — For all the shots Victor Wembanyama hit to get the San Antonio Spurs to the NBA Finals, the series is beginning to be defined by a few of his misses.
After clanking his shot off the rim at the buzzer on what would have been the Game 2 winner, Wembanyama did the same on two key free throws late in Game 4 on Wednesday night. With the chance to put his team up by three with 1:47 left, he instead went 0 for 2, and the New York Knicks took the lead and went on to win 107-106 on OG Anunoby's tip-in with 1.2 seconds left.
“It's just a shot,” Wembanyama said. “You might work on your form hours and hours. At the end of the day it's just a shot, so you need to shoot it the normal way.”
Wembanyama and the Spurs are now on the brink of elimination, down 3-1 in the best-of-seven series. It mattered little that the 7-foot-4 big man from France scored 24 points and had 13 rebounds.
It mattered more that the Knicks held Wembanyama to eight points in the second half on the way to rallying from 29 points down, the largest comeback in finals history. Game 5 is Saturday night San Antonio.
“It’s going to go one of two ways,” Wembanyama said. “One of two ways, a bad one and a good one. The bad one would be giving up. The good one would be getting stronger through this, getting more together. I know this is what we’re going to do.”
Wembanyama enters Game 5 on the edge of possible discipline after being called for a flagrant foul early in the second half for a right elbow to Karl-Anthony Towns' chin. Because of the NBA's flagrant foul point system, he now has three and is one more away from an automatic one-game suspension.
“Of course I'm going to be a little more careful, but it’s not going to change much,” Wembanyama said.
An officiating decision in the aftermath of Game 3 going the other way would have put him in danger of already staring down a suspension. The NBA acknowledged officials missed Wembanyama striking Knicks guard Jalen Brunson in the head but did not retroactively make it a flagrant.
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“The league’s going to do what they’re going to do,” New York coach Mike Brown said before Game 4. “They aren’t going to listen to me. They aren’t going to listen to nobody else.”
Wembanyama early in Game 4 looked to be getting under the skin of his opponents. After scoring on Mitchell Robinson and letting him hear about it while going back down the court late in the first quarter, he took a forearm to the face and appeared to say, “I'm in your head, bro,” while pointing to his right temple.
A similar play happened early in the second, when 6-foot guard Jose Alvarado jostled with Wembanyama before ultimately pushing the 7-4 big man's right leg to get him to the ground.
Things changed after halftime. San Antonio had its biggest lead of the night at 81-52 when Wembanyama elbowed Towns, and the Knicks outscored the Spurs 55-25 the rest of the way.
Wembanyama played all but three minutes of the first half, which coach Mitch Johnson called normal. Johnson said Wembanyama, who ended up playing nearly 44 minutes, got a little more playing time to try to close it out.
“With two days after this, what was at stake, we wanted to win the game and try to put it away,” Johnson said.
Asked if that caused him to wear down as the game went on, Wembanyama responded: “Substitution patterns, I don’t know. It’s not really my expertise. But, yeah, I guess I did.”
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