The San Antonio Spurs are still recovering from a historic collapse in Game 4 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday night. A lot of things have to go wrong, from a lot of people, in order for such a meltdown to happen, but De’Aaron Fox is catching most of the blame for the blown lead.
That’s understandable, considering that he is guilty of making the biggest mistake that cost the Spurs on Thursday night. Fox passed up the chance to run more time off and get fouled in the final seconds and instead took a layup that was blocked by OG Anunoby. That play kept the Spurs’ lead at just one and allowed the Knicks to score the game-winning basket on the next possession.
Since then, Fox has been catching a lot of heat. That includes from former NBA guard Patrick Beverley, who demands that Fox get the “JR Smith treatment” for what he did.
“Don’t u start that. He was God awful,” Beverley wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Very selfish down the stretch. Give him that JR Smith treatment.”
Beverley responded to another former player, Brandon Jennings, who was saying that Fox shouldn’t have to shoulder all of the blame for the loss.
There’s a real argument to be made that Fox made the biggest NBA Finals blunder since Smith’s back in 2018, when he forgot the score during the end of Game 1 between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors.
However, there is one major difference.
The Cavs were likely going to lose to the Warriors regardless of Smith’s mistake. It might have been in five or six games, but that Cleveland team was at a massive disadvantage.
In Fox’s case, he cost the Spurs a chance to even the series at two games apiece in an NBA Finals that has had extremely small margins so far. Instead, San Antonio is down 3-1 and is staring down elimination. There’s a very real chance that mistake is the reason the Spurs don’t win the title this year, and that will follow him around for the rest of his career.
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