Victor Wembanyama didn’t go full Joe Namath poolside in Miami before Super Bowl III, but the big man came close.
When asked about the mood around the Spurs ahead of Saturday night’s Game 5, facing a 3-1 series deficit in the NBA Finals to the Knicks, the Frenchman said the team “absolutely” believes they can spring a most unlikely comeback.
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“Everybody thinks, everybody knows, we’re going to do it,” Wembanyama said Friday.
“I feel like we need to isolate that one game and take it one game at a time,” he continued. “I think it would be a mistake to waste our energy on multiple games. It’s one game at a time.”
Guard Devin Vassell echoed the “one game at a time” mantra.
“Nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is promised. But we know we’ve at least got one game,” Vassell said. “So we need to go 1-0, and whatever we need to do for that to happen, we’ve got to do that.”
He added: “We’ve got our backs against the wall. Let’s just focus on trying to go 1-0… and then from there we’ll just try to walk it down.”
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The comments come after the Spurs saw a 29-point third-quarter lead – that was still at 20 points with under 10 minutes to play in the fourth quarter – slip away in a tremendous collapse in Game 4 at MSG.
Wembanyama said there were “a thousand ways we could have not lost that game,” but the team has shifted its focus to Saturday night.
“It felt like there was a time to process this, to really dwell on it. But not anymore,” he said.
The Game 4 loss wasn’t the only one the Spurs and Wembanyama let slip through their fingers. The Spurs let a 14-point third-quarter lead slip in Game 1 and Wembanyama had a terrible late turnover and missed two shot attempts in a one-point loss in Game 2.
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“We’re very confident, but yeah, I wouldn’t say it was so hard to, like, shake off, right?” Wembanyama said about Game 4. “Harder than any other game before, by far, for sure. I mean, now we’re over it. It’s the playoffs. There’s no time to regret things for too long.”
Vassell added the Spurs feel they’ve played the Knicks “really good for the past four games.”
“We just really haven’t been able to close out games,” the guard said. “Obviously, a credit to them. But we feel like we have been able to control a lot of this series, and we’ve just got to figure out how to finish these games.”
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