11-game winning streak snapped with a 114-89 loss<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe physical defense was nothing the Spurs hadn’t seen before. So Wembanyama expected the Spurs to stand up to it better at Madison Square Garden, but instead they never recovered from the Knicks’ 26-2 run in the first half.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe gave them life,\u201d Wembanyama said. \u201cWe should have been better, especially on that run in the first quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Spurs were 11-0 in February, becoming the first team in NBA history to go unbeaten and score at least 110 points in every game while playing at least 10 in a month. It appeared they would keep on rolling when they raced to a 19-7 lead Sunday.<\/p>\n
But the Knicks shut them down from there, changing the game with their big run and holding the Spurs to their lowest point total of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was surprised, yeah,\u201d Wembanyama said. \u201cIt feels like they\u2019re a good basketball team, they are good actual basketball players. They\u2019re not the nastiest, ugly team, you know? They\u2019re not an ugly team to watch but they made our game ugly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wembanyama had 25 points, 13 rebounds and four blocked shots, bouncing back offensively after getting held to 12 points in each of the last two games. But he committed seven turnovers and blamed himself for playing too hesitantly, especially with his 3-point shooting. He was 1 for 7 behind the arc.<\/p>\n
He also said he made a mistake on a play that both he and Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said was a pivotal one. The Spurs failed to come up with the rebound when Knicks center Mitchell Robinson missed a free throw with San Antonio leading 21-14 late in the first quarter. New York then finished the period with an 8-0 run to take a lead and then poured it on early in the second.<\/p>\n
Before that, Johnson said \u201cthe first 10 minutes roughly couldn\u2019t have gone almost any better for us.\u201d Afterward, his team hardly resembled the one that had surged into the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think if you watched us even a little bit this year, the best version of us is fast, activity, space, pace,\u201d Johnson said, \u201cwhether that\u2019s ball movement, body movement or a combination of. And at that point through that stretch we were it felt like in quicksand a lot, both ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Wembanyama quickly swatted away any panic after the Spurs’ first loss since Jan. 31 at Charlotte.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I don\u2019t see any regression,\u201d the All-Star center said. \u201cI think it\u2019s good for us to see this kind of adversity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Victor Wembanyama was surprised. His San Antonio Spurs, who were untouchable in February, were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1981,1970,2097,2096,7,686,6,67,969,66,2098],"class_list":["post-634636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-app-professional-sports","tag-app-sports","tag-associated-press","tag-austin","tag-basketball","tag-dallas","tag-nba","tag-news","tag-san-antonio","tag-sports","tag-texas"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116160332249806824","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}