Welcome to the Game Thread. Veterans of the Game Thread know how we do things around here, but for all you newbies we have a few rules. Our apply and basically say be cool, no personal attacks, don’t troll and don’t swear too much.

It feels like it’s been a million years since the Silver and Black played a game that counted, but it was just over a week ago that San Antonio was blown out by the Celtics in Boston. Tonight, they’re in Austin at the Moody Center, and facing the Phoenix Suns with Kevin Durant playing his first game on the University of Texas campus since 2007. Kevin has been in the NBA so long that he actually played for the Seattle SuperSonics.

Tonight’s game is nominally a home game for San Antonio, and it will be played in front of a crowd that will be very much pro-Spurs, but the Spurs won’t return to the Frost Bank Center until March 2 when they play the Thunder on the second night of a back-to-back. It’s the first night of a back-to-back tonight, and they’ll face the rising Pistons tomorrow at 7:30 in the same arena. It will be great to see Cade Cunningham tomorrow, but tonight they will need to take care of the Suns, who are just above the Spurs in the Western Conference standings at the moment in 11th place, one step outside the play-in tournament. Victor Wembanyama is out for the rest of the season with deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder, so the Spurs are going to need a big game from the the rest of the team to come out with a win tonight. It would be a great night for Stephon Castle to build on the positive exposure from All Star weekend and have a breakout game against the Suns. so let’s watch and find out.

Victor Wembanyama will cheat at cards in the locker room at halftime, causing Chris Paul to challenge him to a quick draw contest tomorrow at high noon. Victor will show up for the duel with some art paper and a set of charcoal pencils, and will win easily with a credible likeness of CP3 that he completes in under 3 minutes.

[Note: I wrote this before the Wembanyama news came out, and I’m just going to leave it as is.]

GO SPURS GOOOO!!!

It is against site policy to post links to illegal streams in the comments, but it is not against site policy to exchange email addresses, for instance.