Manu Ginobili scored 26 points and Tim Duncan added 16 points and 14 rebounds on Monday to lead San Antonio into the NBA semi-finals by beating New Orleans 91-82.
The defending NBA champions took the only road victory in the best-of-seven series to win the Western Conference semi-final four games to three and advance to a showdown with the Los Angeles Lakers to decide a berth in the NBA Finals.
The Spurs and Lakers, who split four regular-season meetings, open the Western Conference final today at Los Angeles, where they flew immediately after the victory.
PHOTO: AFP
Laker star Kobe Bryant is 14-11 against the Spurs in the playoffs with an average of 26.8 points a game against San Antonio in post-season matchups.
“It’s a quick turnaround for us,” Spurs guard Tony Parker said. “They have a presence inside [in Spanish star Pau Gasol] and Kobe is playing unbelievable.”
The Lakers have not lost at home in two months and have won 16 of their past 19 games but New Orleans had a home mastery over the Spurs as well until the game-seven matchup, leading the series 2-0 and 3-2 before San Antonio rallied.
“Sustaining everything they gave us and finding a way to win, this was a huge, huge series for us,” Duncan said. “We’re right back in it. We feel good about ourselves. We felt we could get it done. We gained a lot of confidence.”
San Antonio led most of the night but the Spurs hit only 3-of-17 from the field to open the fourth quarter, allowing the Hornets to rally within 83-80 on a 3-pointer by Jannero Pargo, who scored 15 of his 18 in the fourth quarter.
“Everybody is playing well when they make shots. When things aren’t falling, those are the tough times. You have to play through them and I thought we did that pretty well,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said.
“Everybody was really focused, starting with the defense and the rebounds.”
Pargo missed a 3-pointer that could have leveled the game and Spurs guard Tony Parker answered with a key jump shot to stretch San Antonio’s lead to 85-80 with 50 seconds remaining. The Frenchman finished with 17 points.
New Orleans star Chris Paul drove to the basket but missed a shot over Fabricio Oberto and was forced to foul to stop the clock. The Spurs hit six free throws down the stretch to keep New Orleans at bay.
“It was a good season but we weren’t satisfied,” Paul said. “One thing D-West said in the locker room is that we will be right back here next year. We will be back here next year and we’ll get through it.”
David West led the Hornets with 20 points while Paul and Pargo, who went 6-of-18 from 3-point range, each had 18 points. Paul added 14 rebounds.
“I told them when they start working for next season, remember how they feel right now,” Hornets coach Byron Scott said.
“You don’t go from not making the playoffs to winning the championship. But we’ve got something working here. We’re going in the right direction and we’ve got some good pieces of the puzzle.”
The Spurs led at New Orleans for the fourth game in a row, but where the Hornets had roared ahead with superb third quarters, they were frustrated by the Spurs defense and made their comeback only in the final minutes.
“Finally, experience helped a little bit,” Parker said. “The first three we were up a little bit. We felt if we could hang in in the third quarter we would be all right and in the fourth they missed a lot of open shots.
“We were playing well. We just played terrible fourth quarters. That was the key, playing a full 48 minutes.”
This time, the Hornets were undone in the third, outscored 20-14.
“A bad third quarter,” lamented New Orleans standout Peja Stojakovic, who hit only 3-of-11 from the field. “Our defense was solid. We just couldn’t make shots in the third quarter. They separated themselves. We couldn’t come back.
“I can’t say we played our best. We’re a young team. We’ve had a great season. We’re going to be a contender for a lot of years,” he said.
Ginobili, moved into the starting lineup after coming off the bench much of the season, praised Parker and Bruce Bowen for their defensive work against Paul.
“We have to give Tony and Bruce a lot of credit. They did a heck of a job. He’s an incredible player. They did unbelievable work the last two games,” Ginobili said.
“I just happened to make a lot of shots in the first half. We didn’t play as good in the second half but we stayed solid and kept them to 82 points,” he said.
Parker plans to take the same attitude against the Lakers that he did in distributing the ball against the Hornets in the decider, focusing foremost on Duncan but keeping the ball moving around all his teammates.
“I’m going to approach it the same way I did tonight, make sure Timmy touches the ball and go from there,” Parker said. “Manu had a great game. I will make sure everybody touches the ball, especially Timmy.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier