Klay Thompson on Thursday scored 27 points as the Golden State Warriors recovered from an early mauling to score a 112-92 victory over the San Antonio Spurs.
A stormy encounter between the two Western Conference big guns saw Warriors coach Steve Kerr lose his cool on the sidelines before Spurs counterpart Gregg Popovich was ejected late in the game.
Popovich was tossed in the fourth quarter after picking up a second technical foul following an altercation with a member of the officiating crew.
Photo: AFP
Microphones picked up Popovich swearing at the referee before he was given his marching orders.
Kerr also risked ejection in the first quarter and needed to be held back by assistant Mike Brown after he was handed a technical foul.
The tirade by the Warriors coach came as the Spurs jumped out to a 28-12 first-quarter lead.
“We might as well start every game here down 20 — other than the playoffs last year, that’s been four or five straight games where that’s happened,” Kerr said. “They have an edge on us with their size and strength, and we weren’t ready to battle early, and that’s why we fell behind. Once we started competing and running and pushing the ball, we got into a good groove.”
The reigning champions gradually began chipping away at the deficit and had closed the gap to 34-24 by the end of the first quarter.
Thompson’s 27 points led the Warriors’ scoring, with three rebounds and two assists.
Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry also weighed in with 20-point hauls as the Warriors improved to 6-3 and climbed to third in the Western Conference.
Durant scored 24 points with eight rebounds, while Curry had 21 points. Draymond Green also cracked double digits with 16 points.
“In the first half, our intensity was there, or focus was there, but we just gave up too many offensive rebounds and broken play open threes — and they hit a bunch of them,” Curry said. “Against this team if we can get stops, especially when they have their bigs out there and our playmakers rebound and push and run the wings, things will work in our favor.”
LaMarcus Aldridge led the scoring for San Antonio with 24 points and 10 rebounds, while Kyle Anderson added 16 points.
Pau Gasol had 11 points.
The defeat saw San Antonio fall to 10th with a 4-4 record.
The defeat marked the first time since February 2015 that the Spurs have lost four games in a row.
“Whether you win or lose, it’s a game of mistakes,” Popovich said. “We lost against the best team in the world and there’s a lot of things we need to improve on.”
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