SAN ANTONIO, Texas, (Reuters) – The NBA-leading San Antonio Spurs embarrassed the sliding Miami Heat 125-95 on Friday to extend their franchise record home win streak to 22 games.
San Antonio (51-11) led from start to finish with eight players scoring in double digits and a franchise record 17 three-pointers to hand the Heat its heaviest loss of the season.
“We had one of those nights,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “It doesn’t happen that often and I’m going to go ahead and guess we’re not going have that many threes, maybe next year we’ll do it once.”
Manu Ginobili led the Spurs with 20 points, Matt Bonner came off the bench and made six three-pointers and Tony Parker returned from injury earlier than expected and scored 15.
The loss was the Miami’s third straight and fourth in their last five games despite LeBron James scoring a game-high 26 points for the Heat (43-19).
“They outplayed us and blitzed us,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “There’s nothing really else to say.”
San Antonio’s sharp shooting started early with eight three-pointers in the first quarter as they raced to a 36-12 lead.
Miami pushed back late in the first half with a 12-4 run led by James to finish the first half 12 points behind.
“It was all out at that point,” said James. “Being down 24 or something like that, we just tried to hit a button and just tried to give it all we could. We took it down to 11, we took it down to 12. We had a chance to cut it down to single digits, we missed an open three.”
