The San Antonio Spurs may be young and inexperienced, but certainly aren’t lacking confidence when it comes to their first appearance in the championship series.
Facing a 1-3 deficit, the team is in an unenviable position that most teams don’t come back from, with only one team doing so in NBA history. That team was the Cleveland Cavaliers, featuring superstar LeBron James.
San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama has all the makings of a superstar, but it’s still early in his career. However, he’s surrounded by other potential All-Star players, including Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle, which could help him achieve the unthinkable.
Castle, who played one season of college basketball for the mastermind Dan Hurley at UConn, recently revealed his winning mindset heading towards a must-win Game 5 in San Antonio, where the Spurs lost the first two games of this series.
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“I feel like we’ve made history all year. We’ve proven that with our backs against the wall, we can step up. I don’t really expect this to be any different,” Castle said.
Castle’s mindset is that of a player who has seemingly erased the 3-1 series score and is approaching this as needing to win three consecutive games. It’s certainly not a task this team can’t handle, but one could argue that they’ve also had a much more challenging path than the Knicks to reach these NBA Finals.
In the Eastern Conference Finals, the Knicks struggled against only their first-round opponent, the Atlanta Hawks, defeating them in six games. However, something clicked for the team within the final several games, and that’s when they embarked on a 13-game winning streak, which included back-to-back sweeps of the Atlanta Hawks and Philadelphia 76ers.
Meanwhile, the Spurs’ easiest opponent might have been in the first round as they faced a young Portland Trail Blazers team. San Antonio was fresh to start that series and arguably at their best of the NBA Playoffs.
From there, they had to defeat the Minnesota Timberwolves, a team that played in the Western Conference Finals in back-to-back years, and the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder.
The Thunder series went the distance, with the Spurs winning it in seven games, something that may have taken a lot out of this young team, making its first significant playoff run.
Keeping a strong mindset that believes they can win is crucial, it just feels as if the momentum favors a Knicks team that has found ways to win seemingly impossible games, and more importantly, finish off opponents in games and series.
Game 5 of the NBA Finals arrives at 8:30 p.m. ET on Saturday in San Antonio.
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For more about the San Antonio Spurs and the NBA Finals, visit Newsweek Sports.
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