San Antonio Spurs Regroup After Crushing Game 6 Loss

Hours after suffering perhaps the most traumatic defeat of their NBA careers, the San Antonio Spurs gathered for a team dinner and talked things through. They insist that their confidence hasn’t wavered with Game 7 tonight looming. Per the Express-News: “It definitely helped, because obviously in the locker room everybody was very disappointed,’ Tony Parker said after Wednesday’s practice. ‘We knew that we blew a big opportunity to get it done, to win the championship. So it was great to just talk to everybody and make sure everybody doesn’t stay sad too long. It’s very important that we bounce back and that we forget last night.’ […] The team dinner was a step in that direction, with the players sharing not just a meal but various war stories. For Parker, the game that came to mind was the 2005 Eurobasket semifinal in which France blew a seven-point lead with 47 seconds left against Greece. Then there were some of the bigger heartbreaks of the Duncan era: Derek Fisher and 0.4 seconds in 2004, Ginobili’s Game 7 foul against Dirk Nowitzki in 2006, last year’s collapse in the Western Conference finals. Even those who weren’t around for all of those games could relate. ‘You play enough years, whether it’s high school, AAU, college, overseas, everybody has experienced a loss that really hurts,’ Danny Green said. ‘We have to brush it off and move on. We have one game left. It’s not easy for any team to do that, to bounce back from a game like that. But we have a veteran group and I expect everybody to work past this and have a new attitude and a new face and as a new team tomorrow.’ […] ‘The other option was to go back to our rooms and sit there by ourselves and beat yourself up,’ Tim Duncan said. ‘It’s always good to be around teammates and kind of get some stuff out in the open. We know what’s at stake. We know what we have to do. We know the opportunity we let slip through our fingers. And we’re not going to hand our head and dwell on that. Tomorrow when the ball goes up, we’ll all be ready.'”