Manu Ginobili and the Spurs ‘Devastated’ After Game 6

The San Antonio Spurs were mere seconds away from claiming a fifth NBA Championship last night. They somehow let it slip away, and now they must pick themselves up and try to win Game 7 in Miami. Manu Ginobili knows that may be an impossible task. Per the Express-News: “Manu Ginobili strode to the free-throw line at AmericanAirlines Arena late Tuesday night. The Spurs were ahead by four points. A handful of Miami Heat fans had already begun streaming toward the exits, off to commiserate on South Beach. The Spurs were 28.2 seconds away from a championship. About 20 minutes of real time later, the Heat were celebrating a 103-100 overtime victory, a thrilling end to an instant classic. And the NBA Finals were headed to Game 7. The Spurs fumbled their first chance to finish the defending champions in a hail of missed free throws and missed opportunities down the stretch. The fear now: It might have been their best chance. ‘It’s a tough moment,’ Ginobili said. ‘We were a few seconds away from winning the championship and we let it go.’ Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard each missed foul shots at the end of regulation, and the Heat erased a five-point deficit with 3-pointers from LeBron James and Ray Allen to send the game to overtime. Both came off desperate offensive rebounds from the Heat. The shot from Allen — only the most prolific 3-point shooter in NBA history — came off a kickout from Chris Bosh with 5.2 seconds to go, knotted the score at 95 and gave Miami five more minutes to extend its season. […] Now it’s on to Game 7, a proposition that hasn’t been kind to road teams in the Finals. Of 17 Game 7s in Finals history, 14 have been won by the home team. The last team to win a Game 7 on the road was the 1978 Washington Bullets, who won a championship in Seattle. ‘We know we can win games that are here or anywhere else,’ Tim Duncan said. ‘We just have to execute for a longer period of time.’ […] Forty-eight hours might not be enough for the Spurs to recover from the psychological blow they took Tuesday. ‘I have no clue how we’re going to be re-engergized,’ Ginobili said. ‘We’re devastated. But there’s no Game 8 afterward. So we’re going to have to play our best game.'”