Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals tips Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern from the Frost Bank Center, and the team that won 4-1 against the Oklahoma City Thunder during the regular season has to win it or go down 1-3. [1] The Spurs lost Game 3 on Thursday night 123-108. Victor Wembanyama scored 26 points in that loss. The Thunder traveled to San Antonio for one game, took the home court back, and went home. The series is now the inverse of the regular-season verdict, and the math the Sunday broadcast will be reading is the bench math.

The paper's Saturday account of the home-court question Game 4 inherited framed Game 4 as a second read on whether Wembanyama's home court was a Game-One artifact or an actual edge. Thursday's Game 3 answered the question one way. OKC took an early lead, held a fifteen-point cushion through the middle of the third quarter, and closed the game on a road performance the Frost Bank Center's eighteen-thousand-seat roar did not interrupt. Isaiah Hartenstein's physical defense limited Wembanyama to eight paint shots over the course of the night — against Game 1's twenty-one — and the rest of the Spurs' interior offense did not compensate. [2] The bench differential through three games stands at minus-forty-two with Wembanyama off the floor. The minutes Wembanyama is not playing are the minutes the series is being decided in.

The Game 3 box score reads as a basketball loss with a structural footnote. The Spurs got their twenty-six points from Wembanyama, sixteen from De'Aaron Fox, eleven from Devin Vassell on Vassell's first attempt at the kind of secondary creation Game 1 generated through Dylan Harper. The Thunder distributed twenty-eight to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, twenty-four to Jalen Williams, and produced an opening unit that ran the half-court offense at a pace San Antonio's defense did not match. [2] The road team won by fifteen. The home team's superstar had a quietly efficient game. The series moved one game in the direction that the regular-season record predicted it would not.

What Sunday will say is whether home court is the actual edge or whether the regular-season 4-1 record was the structural verdict only one of the two teams believed in. The Western format puts Games 3 and 4 both in San Antonio; the home team has to win one of them to keep the series competitive. Sunday is must-win in the strict sense. Game 5 is in Oklahoma City on Tuesday. Game 6, if the series gets there, is back at the Frost Bank Center on Thursday. Game 7 is the Saturday May 30 in Oklahoma City — the same Saturday the Champions League final is in Budapest and the broadcast inventory is split. [1] A 1-3 deficit Sunday night gives the Spurs three games to win three in a row with the bench differential they have been carrying through the first three.

The bench question is the structural one. The Thunder's depth was the regular-season verdict and the Game 1 verdict appeared to overturn it; the Spurs won the opener in double overtime with Wembanyama posting 41 and 24 and Dylan Harper recording the first 20-point, 10-assist, five-steal rookie line since Magic Johnson in 1980. [3] Game 2 in Oklahoma City was a Gilgeous-Alexander game. Game 3 in San Antonio was Hartenstein and the OKC depth. Sunday is the question of whether Mark Daigneault's bench rotation is the deep structural element of this series and Game 1 was the outlier — or whether Game 1 was the model and Games 2 and 3 are the two games it takes a top regular-season team to find what works against a young superstar.

The numbers underwrite the broadcast story the rights deal sold the cycle on. Gilgeous-Alexander averaged 31.1 points and shot 55.3 percent from the field during the regular season; he won his second straight MVP in ESPN Shams Charania's reporting before Game 1. [4] Wembanyama, the runner-up, came into the postseason as the league's leading rebounder. The two MVP finalists at opposite ends of the same conference final are what NBC, Disney, and Amazon priced into the $76 billion eleven-year rights deal. The Game 1 spike — four million YouTube views in twenty-four hours on the highlights upload, Wembanyama joining Wilt Chamberlain as the only players with 40 and 20 in a Conference Finals debut — was the broadcast inventory's first verification. The Game 3 loss is the test of whether that verification was a single-night artifact or the platform on which the rights deal's value sits.

What Sunday will show is whether the home court Game 1 created and Game 3 vacated has a third reading. The Spurs went 4-1 against the Thunder in the regular season. The series is 1-2. Two basketball games away, the Western Conference Finals would be over or would be at 2-2, and the rights-deal inventory would be either two games or four games of remaining playoff content. The Memorial Day weekend Sunday primetime is the inventory the broadcast asked for. The Frost Bank Center is the variable. The bench differential is the prior. The third reading happens between roughly 7 p.m. Eastern and a few minutes past 10 p.m. Eastern, and then there is one less game between the Spurs and the end of their season or the Spurs and a road game at Paycom Center to keep it going.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York