Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 32 points, Alex Caruso led another strong bench effort with 22 and the Oklahoma City Thunder moved one win away from a return trip to the NBA Finals by beating the San Antonio Spurs 127-114 on Tuesday night.

Jared McCain — getting the call with Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell both sidelined — scored 20 in his first playoff start for the defending NBA champion Thunder, who leads the Western Conference finals 3-2.

Chet Holmgren scored 16 points and 11 rebounds for the Thunder, while Isaiah Hartenstein had a 12-point, 15-rebound night in Oklahoma City.

Stephon Castle scored 24 points for San Antonio, which got 22 points from Julian Champagnie and 20 points from Victor Wembanyama — who was held to 4-of-15 shooting.

Wembanyama offered an impassioned speech to teammates during a timeout barely two minutes into the third quarter, after the Thunder opened an 18-point lead. And it worked — to a point. Oklahoma City scored again to get the lead up to 20, but the Spurs closed within eight later in the third.

Keldon Johnson scored 15 off the bench for San Antonio, which missed 29 of its 41 three-point tries.

Game 6 is Thursday in San Antonio. If there's a Game 7, it'll be back in Oklahoma City on Saturday — and while this series winds down, the New York Knicks are waiting to see who they'll face.

The Knicks will play the winner of the series in Game 1 of the NBA Finals on June 3, on the road to whichever team emerges victorious.

Oklahoma City scored 40 points in the second quarter to take control and kept the lead the rest of the way.

"We just played to who we were tonight," Gilgeous-Alexander said.

"I might have had the worst start to a basketball game in my career, but the group held it down and kept us in the game," Gilgeous-Alexander said of a sluggish first quarter by the Thunder that saw San Antonio jump into an early eight-point lead.

"Somehow, we still won the first quarter, but that's a testament to the guys in the locker room.

"I've been saying it all year — we're a group of one through 15, and we wouldn't be this deep in the season without everybody on the team, and it showed again tonight," the two-time NBA Most Valuable Player added.

"We made adjustments after the last game and applied what we learned.

"Against a really good team you've just got to try to be better each and every game, and we definitely got better from the last game."

It took nearly 10 minutes for the first free throws to be awarded, but when the parade to the foul line started, it didn't stop.

The teams combined to make 29 free throws in the second quarter alone, the most in the second quarter of any NBA game since the bubble playoffs nearly six years ago. It wasn't a one-sided thing — the Spurs were 15 for 17 in the quarter, the Thunder 14 for 14.

Oklahoma City went up by 20 in the third, before San Antonio closed within eight. The Spurs might have had some chances to cut even further into the deficit, but were fuming — and rightly so, it seemed — over some missed calls in the final minute of the quarter.

A tip-in try by San Antonio's Luke Kornet with about 56 seconds left was knocked off the rim by Oklahoma City's Cason Wallace and should have been goal-tending. And on the next Spurs' possession, an out-of-bounds call that should have gone their way — replays showed the ball went out off Holmgren — did not. Spurs coach Mitch Johnson tried to challenge the call, got ignored, then got a technical foul for arguing.

Agencies