Game 7 is here, and the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder will decide tonight who goes to the NBA Finals. The winner advances to face the New York Knicks, with one team leaving the Western Conference finals and the other moving one step from a championship series.
That is why so many fans are asking what time is the Spurs game tonight: there is no room left in this series for anything but a winner. It is the first Game 7 in a Western Conference finals since 2018, and it comes after Oklahoma City took a 3-2 lead with a 127-114 home win in Game 5 behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s 32 points and nine assists, plus 22 points from Alex Caruso and 16 points and 11 rebounds from Chet Holmgren.
San Antonio has already shown it can bend this series back in its direction. The Spurs opened with a double-overtime win in Oklahoma City, when Victor Wembanyama put up 41 points and 24 rebounds, then later forced this deciding game by winning Game 4, 103-82, on the strength of Wembanyama’s 33 points and a buzzer-beating 3-pointer from half court to end the first half.
Oklahoma City answered in the middle games with the kind of depth that has defined its run. The Thunder won Game 2, 122-113, to even the series at 1-1, then took Game 3, 123-108, to move ahead 2-1 as Gilgeous-Alexander scored 26 points and handed out 12 assists and the bench piled up 76 points. San Antonio pushed back in Game 4, but Game 5 restored Oklahoma City’s edge and put the defending champions one win from another Finals trip.
That is the friction sitting underneath tonight’s matchup. The Thunder are trying to return to the NBA Finals as champions, while the Spurs are trying to get there for the first time since 2014. Game 5 also underlined how narrow the margin has become, with Stephon Castle scoring 24 points for San Antonio, Julian Champagnie adding 22 and Wembanyama finishing with 20 points and six rebounds, while Oklahoma City did it without Jalen Williams because of a left hamstring injury. Dylan Harper also left a game with a right leg injury, another reminder that this series has been taxed by every possession.
However this ends, it will not linger as a simple seven-game story. One side moves on to New York, where the Knicks are waiting. The other stops here, one win short of the NBA Finals, after a series that has already delivered a double-overtime opener, a half-court buzzer beater and now the first Western Conference finals Game 7 in seven years.
