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Michael C. Wright
SAN FRANCISCO — Team Cavs (Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley) bested Team Warriors (Draymond Green and Moses Moody) in the final of the Kia Skills Challenge on Saturday night with a time of 1:00.03, but the event didn’t end without mild controversy.
Team Spurs (Chris Paul and Victor Wembanyama) thought it found a loophole in the rules in the obstacle course that features players speeding through stations with various passing and shooting drills. Instead, the duo found itself disqualified from the competition after the first round for failing to complete their sequence with three valid shot attempts.
Eschewing all shots but one (a Wembanyama dunk) in favor of concentrating on executing the passes, Paul and Wembanyama finished the opening round with a time of 47.9 seconds before officials disqualified the Spurs duo.
“I mean, if the challenge lets us do that, there’s a loophole,” said Wembanyama, who said Team Spurs’ non-shooting tactic was his idea. “It means we’re not a problem.”
The opening-round drill consisted of a variety of passes before the players reached a rack of balls to shoot. Instead of attempting to sink those balls, Team Spurs tossed them in the general direction of the basket without trying to connect. Their effort to speed up the finish to their opening round went for naught.
With the disqualification, Paul now has gone six times in the Skills Challenge without a win. His six appearances are two more than any other player and twice as many as any player besides retired Spurs legend Tony Parker, according to ESPN Research.
“We tried something that we thought could win to see if we had the best time,” said Paul, who pleaded Team Spurs’ case to officials in the aftermath of the disqualification.
Green mentioned that Wembanyama had asked multiple league officials before the competition about the legality of Team Spurs’ strategy of not taking shots.
“It definitely sucked to see them throwing the ball like that,” Green said. “What I will say is Wemby walked around the court asking everybody because they say make one or three attempts. So Wemby said, ‘Oh, I can just get all three of them up there?’ So he asked. He may not have asked the right people. But I will say in Wemby’s defense he asked a lot of people. I heard him ask five or six people.”
According to Skills Challenge rules, players need to take a maximum three valid attempts or make a shot before moving on.