Here’s what Mitch Johnson, Wembanyama, Castle and others had to say following the Spurs’ home win over the Bucks.
SAN ANTONIO — The San Antonio Spurs beat the Milwaukee Bucks 144-118 at home. The win snapped the Spurs’ two-game losing streak and their four-game losing streak to the Bucks.
Victor Wembanyama finished with 30 points and 14 rebounds. Harrison Barnes had 16, and Chris Paul had 12 and nine assists.
Devin Vassell recorded 12 and three assists, Jeremy Sochan added two and seven rebounds and Keldon Johnson had 24 and four rebounds. Stephon Castle had 20. Julian Champagnie recorded six points.
Head coach Gregg Popovich was also out due to illness. Assistant coach Mitch Johnson continues to assume head coaching duties for the game.
The Spurs are 21-24 this season and will face the Heat on Saturday night in San Antonio.
Here’s a sample of what the teams said after the game.
Mitch Johnson:
“It’s funny sometimes you put yourself into the game, and those effort and energy aspects, the ball seems to find you. You make a couple shots. I’m sure it’s coach speak, but it does feel like it does happen more than it doesn’t when you have the right approach. Where you just put yourself in the game in those ways where you’re not dependent on the basketball.”
“He (Castle) is an extremely aggressive player that can do so many different things. He may crash the car every now and then. I think it’s fair that anybody, when you drive that fast and aren’t as experienced, and I think you see him learning on the job.”
Keldon Johnson:
“Being in the right spots, believing in myself, my teammates hit me in the right spots to, you know, make shots and then the rest of take care itself. Just being aggressive, doing what I work on, just going from there.”
Wembanyama:
“I could feel like everybody was tired of losing. So we didn’t let go the whole game. The game was consistently hard, so we make efforts for 40 minutes, and you look up and you’re up 20 because you because there was the game was consistently hard. There wasn’t one moment where we would let them be and score on us and make some huge runs on him. It’s what we got to get inspired by that, but we’ll see. I hope that is the case.”
“I feel like the starting group, we were kind of even with them (Bucks). We were getting stops, scoring in transition, and then they would go on their runs, get stops, and go transition. But I feel like Keldon’s energy off the bench in the first half kind of kept us in that game because that could have went a different way for us.”
Damian Lillard:
Giannis Antetokounmpo: