C.J. Holmes: Spurs’ youth cuts both ways, but Game 3 showed why it can shift NBA Finals
· Yahoo Sports
NEW YORK — Victor Wembanyama caught the first lob. Stephon Castle made the last free throws. In between, the San Antonio Spurs gave the New York Knicks just enough chances to remind everyone how young they still are.
Game 3 didn’t make San Antonio a finished product.
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It just showed the Spurs are young, flawed and already good enough to win anyway.
With the Spurs’ 115-111 win at Madison Square Garden on Monday, the Knicks‘ NBA Finals lead is down to 2-1 and Game 4 on Wednesday suddenly has a different feel. The Knicks are still two wins away from history. But for the first time in these Finals, San Antonio’s youth didn’t feel like such a problem.
Wembanyama scored the first points of Game 3 on a lob dunk over Karl-Anthony Towns. The Knicks followed with a turnover, another turnover and a Mikal Bridges 3-pointer Wembanyama blocked. Devin Vassell hit a 3. San Antonio led, 7-0, before the Knicks even had a chance to breathe.
The Spurs didn’t look overwhelmed by the Garden. In a way, they looked freed by it.
San Antonio’s best players are still almost impossibly young. Wembanyama is 22. Castle is 21. Dylan Harper and Carter Bryant are 20. Most of the rest of the team’s rotation is still in their mid-20s. De’Aaron Fox, at 28, is somehow the adult in the room.
All of it shows. Their age shows up as speed, size, bounce, bad fouls, missed box-outs and, at times, careless possessions. And Knicks exposed plenty of it in Game 3, grabbing 12 offensive rebounds and scoring 21 second-chance points.
Wembanyama finished with 32 points, eight rebounds, six assists and three blocks, but the rebounding total still felt light for a specimen like him. Harper missed all eight of his 3-point attempts. Fox threw away a pass in the final minutes but still hit the biggest shot of the night with 12.2 seconds left.
But the Knicks kept coming, because that’s what they do. Brunson scored 32. OG Anunoby added 28. Josh Hart had 16 points, nine rebounds and five assists. Even after a rough start, even after falling behind by 12 late in the first quarter, the Knicks led, 64-57, at halftime.
However, San Antonio hit first again. Brunson opened the third quarter by losing the ball out of bounds. Towns threw a bad pass on the next Knicks possession. Julian Champagnie hit a 3. Brunson was assessed a Flagrant 1 on the closeout. Less than two minutes into the second half, the Knicks’ seven-point lead was down to one.
The Spurs didn’t grow up overnight. They just made the chaos work for them.
“I understand the discourse around it, but that’s not an age thing or an experience thing, that’s a makeup and a personality thing,” Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson said Tuesday.
Fox saw the same thing from inside the locker room. He’s watched Wembanyama, Castle and Harper absorb Knicks runs without wearing panic on their faces.
“That’s why we’re so good, because we have the youth, we have the size, we have the athleticism, we have the poise to be able to withstand those things,” Fox said.
Castle scored 23 points, including 18 in the first half, then saved his strongest moments for the stretch San Antonio failed to own in Games 1 and 2. In those first two games, the Spurs’ youth showed up late as mistakes. In Game 3, it showed up late as winning plays.
Castle fouled Brunson with 3:40 left, and Brunson made both free throws to cut the Spurs’ lead to six. Fox threw a bad pass out of bounds. The Knicks got three chances on one possession: Brunson missed a layup, Castle blocked him, Towns missed a putback, Fox blocked him and Towns missed again. Brunson later pulled the Knicks within four.
Many young teams might’ve folded there, but Castle answered instead. With 1:53 left, he hit a 26-foot 3 off a Wembanyama assist to push San Antonio’s lead back to seven. Brunson later buried a transition 3 to cut it to 111-108. Fox came back with the dagger, even though Anunoby hit a 3 to make it 113-111 moments later.
Then Castle, 21 years old and standing in the middle of the first NBA Finals game at the Garden since 1999, made both free throws with 6.8 seconds remaining. It wasn’t clean, but they got it done.
The Spurs aren’t a finished machine. They still give up too many offensive boards. They still foul. They still let games get uncomfortable when it could be avoided. They still have nights when their best stretches make them look like the future and their rough stretches make them look like a team learning on the job.
The Knicks are still good enough and stubborn enough to make every lesson hurt.
But Game 3 showed growth from San Antonio anyway. The Spurs didn’t wait for experience to arrive. They played through their youth, around it and, finally, because of it.
Harper put it simply.
“I feel like with the level of desperation and desire that we played with last night, I feel like we’re pretty hard to beat when we do that,” he said.
Wembanyama was asked Tuesday whether a team can learn fast enough in the playoffs to win without first paying the usual cost of failure. His answer was short, but it said enough about where the Spurs believe they are and how quickly they believe they can grow.
“But most importantly be relentless,” Wembanyama said.
And if that confidence is left unchecked, it could be enough to flip this series.
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