Jose Alvarado Body-Slams Victor Wembanyama in Game 4 and Doesn’t Get Whistled for It
Jose Alvarado is 6-foot on a good day. Victor Wembanyama is 7-foot-4 with a wingspan that needs its own zip code. None of that mattered in Game 4 of the NBA Finals.
Alvarado grabbed Wembanyama’s leg on a rebound, yanked, and brought the Spurs star to the floor like he was finishing a move at Wrestlemania. The two then exchanged shoves before Alvarado fell as well. The whistle blew. No flagrant. Common foul. Play on.
This is the kind of play that gets ejections in 90 percent of NBA games. In a Finals game, against a 22-year-old generational talent, in front of a hostile road crowd, the officials gave Alvarado a free pass. Even Dave Portnoy was stunned in real time.
Alvarado had been telegraphing this for two games. After Wembanyama’s hard foul on Jalen Brunson in Game 3, Alvarado told reporters the Spurs star had “gotten away with one” and that he would not get another. Then he did exactly what he said he was going to do. He found Wembanyama on a rebound and took him down.
The play comes from a long tradition of undersized NBA guards weaponizing the fact that referees will not call a flagrant on a tiny guy against a giant. P.J. Tucker spent a decade getting away with this against bigger players. Patrick Beverley made a career out of it. Alvarado has now joined that club in the highest-stakes game of his life.
The Knicks rallied from 29 down to win Game 4 107-106 on an OG Anunoby tip-in. That comeback only happens if the Knicks are willing to play with an edge. Alvarado playing junkyard-dog basketball against the best player in the world is exactly the kind of edge that flipped this game.
Wembanyama did not lose his composure, to his credit. He shoved back, played through it, and finished the game with 24 points and 13 rebounds. But the message was sent. The Knicks are not going to politely guard Wembanyama. They are going to grab, claw, trip, and hold until the officials make them stop.
The league office is going to look at the takedown on Thursday. There is a real chance Alvarado catches a fine or even a Flagrant 1 upgrade after the fact. The NBA does not love precedent-setting plays where guards drag stars to the floor without consequences.
What the NBA cannot do is take the win away. The Knicks lead the series 3-1. They can close it out in San Antonio on Saturday night. Wembanyama, who has been the best player in this series, suddenly has to win two games in a row against a team that knows it can rattle him physically.
The Spurs have not handled the Knicks’ physicality well. They got pushed around in Game 1. They responded in Games 2 and 3. Then they got knocked off track again in Game 4. Wembanyama is brilliant but he is still a slim 22-year-old who is built more like a wing than a center. When opponents play him with bodies, he tends to settle for jumpers.
Alvarado figured that out before half the league did. Now he has a Finals moment that he will be telling his grandchildren about, and the Knicks are one game away from their first title in 53 years.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
