SAN ANTONIO -- Victor Wembanyama lightly tapped a microphone against his right cheek in deep thought Friday, pondering what more he could've contributed to change the outcome of the Spurs' 123-108 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 3 of the Western Conference finals.
Wembanyama scored a team-high 26 points with four rebounds and two blocks, becoming the first Spurs player to produce three straight games with 20-plus points and multiple blocks since 2007, when Hall of Famer Tim Duncan accomplished the feat in eight consecutive outings. Yet for the first time this postseason, San Antonio lost a game in which Wembanyama scored 25 points or more, as the Thunder seized a 2-1 lead in the series.
"I feel like I'm having trouble making my teammates better right now," he said. "My shooting splits aren't terrible. I need to be more of a team player, facilitate better, rebound the ball better, push their defense a little bit further and see how much they need to help with my teammates and [then] feed them."
The Spurs have lost back-to-back games for the first time since January. But San Antonio somewhat cleaned up its turnover woes from Games 1 and 2, largely due to the return of guards De'Aaron Fox and Dylan Harper, who both helped Stephon Castle with the ballhandling duties. In the series' first two games, Castle totaled 20 turnovers, the most by one player in a two-game span in postseason history during the tracking era (since 1977).
But Fox helped San Antonio speed to a 15-0 start in Game 3 by scoring four of his nine first-quarter points while adding a steal and a rebound in the first 2:37 of the game, as fans at Frost Bank Center roared.
The Spurs became the second team in the play-by-play era (since 1997-98) to start a playoff game on a 15-0 run or better and lose, joining the Washington Wizards, who opened the Eastern Conference semifinals in 2017 on a 16-0 run against Boston but lost 123-111.
"It's a long game," said Fox, who aggravated the high right ankle sprain that kept him out of the first two games of the series late in Friday's contest. "It's hard to sustain something like that, especially for a full 48 minutes. But when you see the lead kind of dwindle, it's something that's like, 'Damn, we got this lead, and it went away so quickly.'"
The team's struggles with Wembanyama off the floor was one of the culprits. San Antonio outscored Oklahoma City 26-11 in the first quarter with him on the floor, but when he subbed out, the Thunder outscored the Spurs 15-5. Wembanyama either scored or assisted on 14 of San Antonio's 31 points in the first quarter, with Fox shooting 3-of-3 off his passes.
"We were really sharp to start the game and obviously didn't sustain it, and that wasn't sustainable how we started," Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said. "I thought we played very fast. That's something that tapered off as the game went along."
San Antonio's struggling bench didn't help. Oklahoma City's backups had outscored the Spurs' reserves 107-41 over the first two games of the series, before blasting the home team 76-23 in bench scoring in Game 3. Thunder backup guard Jared McCain had 24 points in 27 minutes.
Asked about the bench's struggles over the first three games of the series, Wembanyama made it a point to include the entire team.
"I feel like each and every one of us got to be better," Wembanyama said. "It's just that as a team, as an organization, there's a lot of new experiences. We're just going to have to find the answers. It's my first playoffs. It's the first playoffs for many of us. Of course, there was going to be hard trials. That's to be expected. But now, we're going to see what we're made of."