Sports / Dallas, Texas — The Spurs vs Mavericks final score — San Antonio Spurs 122, Dallas Mavericks 106, on Saturday night at American Airlines Center — was a tale of two short-handed rosters and one fourth quarter. Dallas played without Cooper Flagg and Kyrie Irving, led briefly in the third quarter behind a franchise-record first-half paint performance, and then ran out of gas as San Antonio outscored the Mavericks 30-17 over the final 12 minutes for its first win of the season.
The Spurs vs Mavericks final score leaves both teams at 1-2 — and spares San Antonio a piece of history it wanted no part of. The Spurs had lost to Oklahoma City on Tuesday and to Houston in Austin on Friday, and a third straight defeat would have meant their first 0-3 start since the 2008-09 season. Instead, Victor Wembanyama shook off one of the slowest starts of his career — a single point until midway through the second quarter — to finish with 23 points, seven rebounds and four blocks, rookie Dylan Harper added 22 points and five rebounds, and De'Aaron Fox and Stephon Castle scored 19 apiece as San Antonio won the second night of a back-to-back for both teams.
A Dallas team missing its two biggest names
The context in Dallas starts with who was not on the floor. Flagg sprained his left shoulder in Friday's win at Indiana — the injury covered in Signal Post News' report on Flagg's shoulder injury in the Mavericks' win over the Pacers — and will be reevaluated next week. Irving was held out for left knee injury management on the second night of the back-to-back; he returned this season after 19 months out with a torn ACL, and Dallas is plainly not going to spend him on consecutive nights in October. That left the Mavericks asking a rookie, Sergio De Larrea, to lead them — and for a half, improbably, he did. De Larrea scored 21 points off the bench, 13 of them before halftime, while Marcus Sasser, P.J. Washington and Daniel Gafford added 12 each, Zaccharie Risacher 11 and Naji Marshall 10.
Dallas even owned the game's strangest statistic. The Mavericks scored 46 points in the paint in the first half — a franchise high in the play-by-play era, which dates to 1997-98, according to the Elias Sports Bureau — and shot 51.1 percent for the night, better than San Antonio's 47.5 percent. On shooting alone, Dallas should have been in this game to the final minute. The game was lost everywhere else: San Antonio grabbed 15 offensive rebounds, turned them into a 25-10 edge in second-chance points, and forced 21 Dallas turnovers. A team missing its two primary ball-handlers gave the ball away 21 times, and a team with Wembanyama at the rim still surrendered second and third shots all night. Those are the two sentences that explain 122-106.
One point, then two dunks, then a game
The first quarter swung on two dunks in its final minute. Washington's dunk, off a Risacher steal with 38 seconds left, put Dallas ahead by one, and Carter Bryant answered with a dunk of his own to give San Antonio a 32-31 lead after 12 minutes. Dallas pushed the margin to six midway through the second quarter, capped by a Sasser pull-up jumper with 5:23 remaining — at which point Wembanyama still had just one point. Then the game tilted. Wembanyama threw down two alley-oop dunks in the space of two minutes, reached 12 points by halftime, and San Antonio closed the half on a 14-3 run punctuated by Keldon Johnson's tip-in at the 2:08 mark for a 59-54 lead. Fox had 15 points by the break and Castle 11, and the Spurs led 68-60 despite Dallas' record paint scoring.
The third quarter nearly reversed everything. San Antonio stretched the lead to 77-63 four minutes in, and Dallas roared back — scoring 22 of the next 29 points and briefly regaining the lead — before Castle and Wembanyama hit late threes to send the Spurs into the fourth ahead 92-89. It was the last time the game was genuinely in doubt. San Antonio opened the fourth on an 11-3 run for a 103-92 edge at the 9:05 mark, outscored Dallas 30-17 in the quarter, and led by as many as 23 points late as the Mavericks ran out of gas. Julian Champagnie added 12 points and Devin Vassell 11 for the Spurs, whose scoring was spread across six players in double figures — the kind of balance a team leans on when its star spends a quarter and a half as a decoy.
Why this matters
Strip away the absences and this game still told both teams something real about themselves. For San Antonio, the encouraging part is not that Wembanyama eventually got his 23 — it is how the Spurs survived the stretch when he had almost nothing. Fox's 15 first-half points, Castle's steadiness, Harper's 22 off a rookie's fearlessness, and a 25-10 second-chance margin built on effort rather than scheme: that is a supporting cast winning the minutes its franchise player could not. A young team that had started 0-2, on the road, on the second night of a back-to-back, could easily have folded when Dallas retook the lead in the third. Instead the Spurs produced their best quarter of the young season when the game was tightest, which is precisely the habit that separates a rebuilding team with a generational player from a team that is merely waiting for one.
For Dallas, the lesson is colder. The Mavericks shot better than their opponent, set a franchise record for first-half paint scoring, got 21 points from a rookie off the bench — and lost by 16 at home. Twenty-one turnovers and a 15-point deficit in second-chance points are not bad luck; they are what a roster looks like when its two creators are in street clothes and its frontcourt cannot finish possessions on the glass. The back-to-back caveat is real, and so is the injury caveat: Flagg will be reevaluated next week, and Irving's knee management is a plan, not a setback. But 1-2 with a home loss this lopsided is a reminder of how thin Dallas' margin is whenever either star sits — and in a Western Conference where seeding is decided by a handful of games, nights like this one are the ones that get counted in April.
What happens next
The schedules split the two teams in opposite directions. Dallas travels to Miami on Monday, October 26, still without any guarantee about Flagg's shoulder — his reevaluation is set for next week — and with Irving's availability on the road an open question of the same knee-management plan. San Antonio goes home to host Sacramento on Tuesday, October 27, carrying the one thing a young team cannot buy: proof that it can win a road game when its best player starts slowly and its opponent shoots over 50 percent. Wembanyama's line — 23 points, seven rebounds, four blocks — will read as routine by his standards. The Spurs will know better. This was the night the rest of the roster won a game first, and he finished it.
Sources
Reuters / Field Level Media game report (Wembanyama 23 points, seven rebounds, four blocks; Harper 22; Fox and Castle 19 each; De Larrea 21 for Dallas; Flagg's sprained left shoulder and reevaluation next week; Irving held out for left knee injury management; quarter-by-quarter flow including the 14-3 second-quarter run, the 77-63 third-quarter lead, Dallas' brief comeback and the 11-3 fourth-quarter opening run): https://www.reuters.com/sports/basketball/victor-wembanyama-spurs-pull-away-short-handed-mavs--flm-2026-10-25/ · Associated Press game coverage via theScore / KYNT (final score and quarter scores — Spurs 32-36-24-30, Mavericks 31-29-29-17; Dallas' 46 first-half paint points a franchise high in the play-by-play era since 1997-98, per Elias Sports Bureau; both teams 1-2; Spurs avoiding a first 0-3 start since 2008-09 after losses to Oklahoma City and Houston): https://www.thescore.com/ · Sportradar official match record (Final: San Antonio 122, Dallas 106, American Airlines Center, Saturday October 24, 2026; team shooting — San Antonio 47.5 percent, Dallas 51.1 percent; up next — Mavericks at Miami on Monday October 26, Spurs host Sacramento on Tuesday October 27): https://sportradar.com/