With less than three minutes to play in the first half of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, San Antonio Spurs rookie Carter Bryant drove past Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and threw down a huge, nasty, two-handed dunk, pushing the Spurs' lead to 12 and sending the home crowd's decibel level into Krakatoan territory. When Devin Vassell immediately followed it at the other end by rejecting Chet Holmgren's point-blank dunk attempt and woofing in the dead-eyed noodleman's face about it, Thursday's game seemed on the verge of breaking open. It had been threatening to do that ever since the Spurs opened the night on a 9-2 run.
The Oklahoma City Thunder reeled it back in, as they reliably do. Alex Caruso beat the shot clock with a three to salvage that possession, Gilgeous-Alexander hit a tough midrange shot and a pair of free throws, and Cason Wallace splashed a three. By the time the halftime buzzer sounded, San Antonio's lead instead was a manageable seven points. But the game had a pattern, one deeply unfavorable to the defending champs: The Thunder were grinding for every look they got, discombobulated and frantic, never more than a hair ahead of San Antonio's relentless ball pressure and warp-speed defensive rotations. Every basket they got felt like a completed Hail Mary. Meanwhile the Spurs were (relatively speaking) breezing through possessions, getting to their spots, running into threes off Oklahoma City's misses, muscling their way to the rim for tough, chesty interior buckets. It recalled Game 4 of last spring's East final, with the Thunder in the role of the scrambling New York Knicks and the Spurs as the Indiana Pacers: one team bailing water out of a rapidly leaking boat, the other team the ocean.
Even the implacable Thunder can only stave off the ocean for so long. The teams traded buckets for the first few minutes of the third quarter, but Oklahoma City was in trouble. Three of their first four baskets of the half came via Isaiah Hartenstein's fuck-ass floater and a pair of tip-ins off misses, papering over aimless possessions. Sometimes this sort of thing amounts to a team staying afloat long enough to get the pumps running. Other times it is a sign that the boat is sinking.
When Gilgeous-Alexander isolated Victor Wembanyama with around 8:30 to play in the quarter, drove toward the baseline, and hit a tough, high-arcing 11-footer over the Defensive Player of the Year's outstretched arm, cutting San Antonio's lead to eight, you could hear some exasperation in Reggie Miller's voice on the TV broadcast: "Don't you want to see more of that?" he asked Jamal Crawford. "I wanna see more of that!" He'd have to wait a while. The Thunder did not score their next point until less than a minute remained in the quarter. In the interim, the Spurs scored 20, and for all practical purposes ended the game, which they won, 118-91.
San Antonio's single biggest problem in this series has been its struggle to survive the minutes when Wembanyama goes to the bench: Without him walling off Oklahoma City dribble-drives a mile from the hoop, the Spurs generally can't pressure the ball as doggedly out on the perimeter without either giving up bunches of layups or helping off open shooters. But Wembanyama sat down shortly after that Gilgeous-Alexander basket, when San Antonio's run stood at a whopping 2-0; by the time he came back in, with around four minutes left in the quarter, Oklahoma City had missed nine consecutive shots and San Antonio had scored the game's last 13 points.
A certain brain-boomed incoherence was creeping into almost everything the Thunder did. Hartenstein, catching the ball wide open in the middle of the lane, threw a too-hard alley-oop lob to Holmgren (useless, needs therapy) from three feet away, and he couldn't catch it. Caruso leapt out too aggressively to try and intercept a simple guard-to-guard pass from Dylan Harper to Stephon Castle at the top of the key, leaving Castle unimpeded to knife inside Oklahoma City's defense for an and-one layup. Gilgeous-Alexander pumped up and bricked a needless contested 15-footer with 14 seconds left on the shot clock. A minute later, he let Harper blow by him in transition and then whacked him across the head, not nearly hard enough to prevent another and-one layup.
Caruso aborted a dribble-drive at the free-throw line as though Wembanyama and not Luke Kornet stood between him and the hoop, kicking off a series of ball rotations that led to two passed-up open looks and a frantic Gilgeous-Alexander live-ball turnover. Gilgeous-Alexander dribbled away half of a shot clock getting nowhere against Vassell, threw a grenade to Caruso, then stood aimlessly at the free-throw line extended, donating his own defender to the effort to corral Wallace's dribble-drive. Catching the ball on the left wing in transition off a live-ball turnover, with three of his teammates trailing into an unsettled San Antonio defense, Gilgeous-Alexander stood stock still for four seconds then pumped up a flat-footed three-pointer with Harper inside of his jersey; he might just as well have handed the ball to him.
Wallace dribble-dribble-dribbled his way to the dunker's spot and threw a hopeless pass directly to Julian Champagnie with 10 seconds left on the shot clock. Jared McCain, ruthlessly exploited on defense all night, dribbled around a Holmgren screen and immediately lobbed a pass into the stands. Kenrich Williams dribbled into the middle of the lane and somehow twisted his way into an inexplicable, hopeless fallaway jumper with nine seconds left to find literally any other shot besides that one. At this point, I'm recapping these things because it's fun to remember them; the game was effectively over by the time a Holmgren bunny ended San Antonio's 20-0 run with 55 seconds left in the third.
In case it's not clear, Gilgeous-Alexander was dreadful in Game 6, as the MVP mostly has been throughout the series. He posted a minus-28 in his 28 minutes on Thursday night; his minus-28 over the whole series is the worst such figure on either team. He managed the neat paradoxical feat of rushing Oklahoma City's offense while also sucking all the energy out of it. When he had the ball, he dribbled it to nowhere and did nothing in particular with it; when he didn't have the ball, he stood absolutely still, nowhere in particular. But he wasn't the only Oklahoma City star who harmed the cause in Game 6. Jalen Williams, injured all series and questionable until a couple minutes before tipoff, shouldn't have played at all. The Thunder lost his 10 minutes by a whopping 18 points, as the Spurs singled him out for attack at one end and his clear lack of rhythm and bounce mucked-up Oklahoma City's offense at the other.
What a weird series this has been! Each team has looked deader than dead at times: After Game 3 I couldn't imagine the Spurs would even push it to six, and they have outscored the Thunder by 18 points overall. Five of the six games have been outright blowouts, and the sixth, Game 1, went to double overtime but still managed to be a three-possession game at the final buzzer. All I can predict for Game 7, on Saturday night, is that it will happen. Thank whoever you want to thank, and clear your calendar.
