After a dominant Game 6, Victor Wembanyama’s winner-take-all moment has arrived

SAN ANTONIO — Some time before the Spurs’ 118-91 Game 6 win Thursday night, a gathering of excited nuns, dressed uniformly with white habits and team gear, scurried through the bowels of Frost Bank Center.

The Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco had made the trek before, offering their prayers, positive energy and good luck for their beloved home team. And Victor Wembanyama, while not known to be a practicing Catholic — the 7-foot-4 center has studied and shown an appreciation for Buddhism — the similarities between the two walks of life are closer than one would suggest.

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Discipline. Mental fortitude. Compassion. Humility. Necessary ingredients in both. And more importantly, for Wembanyama, essential components of emerging from a playoff elimination game — the first of his young career — unscathed.

Despite committing their lives to a different profession, the soft-spoken Salesian Sisters made their presence felt in a crowd of 20,000, not by the volume of their voices, but by the absence of noise altogether. When Wembanyama drilled his second deep triple 90 seconds into the game — prompting a Mark Daigneault emergency timeout — he simply walked back toward the bench without saying a word, despite teammate Keldon Johnson screaming at the top of his lungs. And when Wembanyama had only Shai Gilgeous-Alexander standing between him and the basket, with a golden opportunity to throw down a thunderous slam, the Frenchman opted for the softest touch possible on a floater.

The message had already been sent. A mastery of the perimeter and the paint. Wembanyama finished with a game-high 28 points, 10 rebounds, 2 steals and 3 blocks in 28 minutes, subbing out with nine minutes to go and nodding his head in approval of a task carried out to completion. A season defined by his continued ascension within the ranks of his peers while discovering himself on a deeper level isn’t quite ready to end.

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“I think we were consistent,” Wembanyama said after the Spurs evened the Western Conference finals at three games apiece. “We did what we needed to do. Trusted the game. Trusted the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/after-a-dominant-game-6-victor-wembanyamas-winner-take-all-moment-has-arrived-045510574.html

Author : Kelly Iko

Publish date : 2026-05-29 04:55:00

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