Devin Vassell said the San Antonio Spurs cannot afford to think beyond Saturday’s Game 5 after falling into a 3-1 hole against the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals.
“Just one game at a time,” Vassell said Friday. “It’s a lot of stuff that we watched in film that we feel like we can control and we can be better at. And so nothing is guaranteed, nothing is promised, but we know we at least got one game.”
The Spurs dropped Game 4 in brutal fashion, losing a 29-point lead as the Knicks completed one of the biggest comebacks in Finals history. Vassell said the locker room quickly shifted from disappointment to urgency.
“Obviously after the game, it’s tough and, you know, locker room’s quiet and we’re trying to figure out exactly what happened, what went wrong,” he said. “Fast forward 48 hours later, same goal, same mission.”
San Antonio has been in position to win each of the first four games, but it has not been able to finish the job. Vassell said that pattern has made the series feel frustrating, but not hopeless.
“We feel like we’ve played them really good for the past four games,” he said. “We just really haven’t been able to close out games. So, that obviously a credit to them, but we feel like we have been able to control a lot of this series and we just got to figure out how to finish these games.”
The Spurs’ issues in Game 4 were rooted, in Vassell’s view, at the defensive end. He said the team’s identity has been built there all season, and that losing that standard changes everything else.
“From the beginning of the season, we’ve hung our hat on the defensive end,” Vassell said. “And when we’re not getting stops, when we’re not communicating, when we’re not doing the things that got us into position that got us a lead, everything else trickles down.”
That includes the offense.
“Our offense is the same,” he said. “We’re not getting out in transition. We’re not running the same sets that we’re normally doing.”
Vassell also pointed to the importance of limiting the size of New York’s runs, even if the Knicks start to heat up.
“If we can stay doing that even during the run, if we can cut down a run from it being a 20-4 run to a 10-4 run and getting stops then we’ll be all right,” he said.
He said Game 4 lingered longer than most losses, but only briefly.
“Yesterday was probably the most I thought about it,” Vassell said. “I thought about that night. Thought about it yesterday. Woke up this morning ready to go. Ready to execute the game plan for the next day.”
Vassell said there is no value in dwelling on what the Spurs missed in the first four games.
“We’re not going to sit here and keep thinking about what we could have done, what should have happened with this or that,” he said. “That’s not changing the result of anything.”
Even with the series on the brink, Vassell said the Spurs still believe a title is possible.
“I mean, of course,” he said when asked about matching history by coming back from 3-1. “But you can’t think about that, honestly at all because you got to start off going 1. You can’t look too far in the future because literally there’s nothing promised for us right now.”
For San Antonio, the task is simple. For Vassell, the message is even simpler.
“We got our back against the wall,” he said. “So, let’s just focus on trying to go 1 which starts tomorrow.”
