San Antonio erased Golden State in an NBA Cup game on Friday night, 123-85, and the 11th straight win should end the debate about whether this streak is real. The only question left is who in the West can keep a game close.
The Spurs opened on an 18-0 run, capped by a Victor Wembanyama reverse dunk with 7:31 left in the first quarter. That is the biggest start to a game by San Antonio in the past 30 seasons. It is also the biggest start Golden State has allowed under Steve Kerr, which says plenty about how the night was going to go.
Nothing about the margin tightened from there. Harrison Barnes hit a 24-footer to make it 95-52 with under a minute left in the third quarter, a 43-point lead, and the game had been decided for roughly the entire evening. Stephen Curry sat out with an oblique tear and is expected to miss at least two weeks. That is a long way from the Doncic matchup we billed as the Cup’s real draw a couple of weeks ago.
Kerr’s postgame read was plain: “They were lights-out. They played a great first five minutes, took it to us. Give them the credit.” Then he went further and called San Antonio “the best team in the league, the hottest team in the league.” A coach who just watched his team fall behind by 18 before it scored does not hand out that kind of sentence to be polite.
The piece of this that should worry the rest of the conference is Stephon Castle. He scored a season-high 32 points in 25 minutes, going 5-of-8 from three, with 6 assists and 5 rebounds. Thirteen of those points came in the first quarter, and he walked in shooting 31.5% from deep on the season.
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Golden State left him open beyond the arc, and he made the Warriors pay for it. I would stop asking whether Castle’s night was a fluke and start asking why anybody believes a defense can afford to leave him alone again, with Wembanyama already demanding the attention.
The counterargument is fair: Golden State played without Curry, and a rout of a short-handed team proves less than a rout of a full one. But the 18-0 run was over before the absence could explain anything, and Kerr’s own words never leaned on it.
Wembanyama, whose offensive workload has been a November storyline, treated the whole thing like a work order. “I’m ready to put my body on the line for the team if that allows us to win by 40,” he said, and the Spurs finished 38 points ahead after leading by 43. Most stars talk about a blowout as a reward. He talks about it as a job requirement, which is the sentence the rest of the West should read twice before the next time San Antonio shows up on its schedule.
