San Antonio Spurs become best in the west; Trounce New Orleans Hornets 128-103: NBA Recap
New Orleans Hornets plight continued as they face another fiasco on Friday night, this time in the form of a 128-103 defeat from San Antonio Spurs, who displaced the Oklahoma City Thunder from the top spot in the Western Conference
with the win.
Eric Gordon put another super performance for the Hornets and erupted with a game high 31. The Hornets however failed as a unit and remained inert at the bottom of Western conference with a 14-41 record.
Spurs had 6 players in double scoring figures with veteran forward Tim Duncan on the top with 19 points and 6 boards. Reserves Manu Ginobili and Patrick Mills shared 14 a piece while Stephen Jackson and Gary Neal had 13 each. Tiago
Splitter collected 10 coming off the bench in Spurs 39th victory of this season.
Tim Duncan was pleased by the team’s performance, especially after the Boston Celtics show on Wednesday. The Spurs beat the C’s by one point.
“We didn't play well the second half of the last game, so we wanted to come out and be a little more focused and play a little better," Duncan said. "It was a good start for us. We got a lot of people in, a lot of different players
in. Everybody we kept rotating in kept playing well, so it was a great team effort."
Apart of Gordon three other players could score in double figures for Hornets. Marco Belinelli had 15 and Reserve Carl Landry poured in 13 points while guard Greivis Vasquez chipped in with 12.
Hornets coach Monty Williams was disappointed at the team’s poor effort.
"Normally, I talk about us and what we didn't do. But that Spurs team is about as complete as I've seen. We couldn't guard tonight. We couldn't have guarded a bike tonight if we were riding it."
After some back and forth action in the opening frame Spurs managed to take a 21-16 advantage with 04:36 in hand. They reeled off a 13-7 run and augmented their advantage to 34-23 in the passage that followed. The Hornets could
score only one more point, 34-24 before the end of 1st quarter.
The Spurs continued to dominate in the second and with the scores at 45-35, they raced away with a huge 27-10 burst. As the game entered into the halftime Spurs had claimed a mammoth 72-45 lead.
San Antonio cruised through the 3rd and with 05:03 in hand they were enjoying an 83-67 lead. That was when they decided to go for another 16-6 run on their way to a 99-73 advantage in the fourth.
The trend continued into the last 12 minutes and deep into the 4th the Spurs had ballooned their advantage to an unquestionable 121-89. The hapless Hornets outscored the Spurs 14-7 in the last couple of minutes, but
that only helped in reducing the margin of defeat.
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