SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The long, strange trip the San Antonio Spurs faced to get home from the East Coast was tiring and, at times, scary, but it turned out to be well worth the journey.
San Antonio defeated the Orlando Magic 112-103 on Sunday night in a game that started five hours late after the Spurs dealt with a series of travel woes.
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San Antonio Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson signals to his players during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Orlando Magic in San Antonio, Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) moves the ball up court against the Orlando Magic during the second half of an NBA basketball game in San Antonio, Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) scores against the Orlando Magic during the first half of an NBA basketball game in San Antonio, Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
A woman takes a photo on a snow-covered street, Sunday, Feb 1, 2026, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)
Snow covers parked cars, Sunday, Feb 1, 2026, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)
Returning to what he called his normal — playing basketball following a dubious 24 hours — Victor Wembanyama had 25 points, eight rebounds, five blocks and four steals as San Antonio regained second place in the Western Conference.
“We have to answer to our responsibility,” Wembanyama said. “We actually discussed it before, there’s no excuse. We need to be ready for tonight. So ... I mean, it doesn’t really matter.”
With the Spurs (33-16) moving ahead of the Denver Nuggets (33-17), San Antonio coach Mitch Johnson will represent the West in coaching one of the teams in the NBA All-Star Game.
Playing, let alone winning and securing the honor for Johnson seemed improbable for the Spurs following their 111-106 loss to the Hornets.
San Antonio planned to fly out two hours after that game, but had to stay overnight because of the storm that dropped nearly a foot of snow in and around North Carolina's largest city.
The NBA on Saturday changed the start time from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. because of a bomb cyclone in Charlotte that grounded flights.
"It was ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ a little bit," Johnson said, referring to the 1987 road trip comedy film starring Steve Martin and the late John Candy. “Had a little bit the COVID PTSD just with the uncertainty, but it was good. We got back to the hotel last night and got some sleep and stuff, so some good quality time.
"Reminded me a little bit of the G League days. Had those long travel days, and bust out some cards or tell some jokes and stuff.”
The Spurs left Charlotte at 9:20 a.m. Sunday, but the flight was diverted to Atlanta because of what forward Keldon Johnson said was a loss of cabin pressure. The flight landed at 11:01 a.m. in Atlanta, where the Spurs remained for more than two hours before switching planes for their flight home. They arrived in San Antonio at 3:25 p.m.
“It was a little scary,” Keldon Johnson said. “I mean they came on the intercom, said we was losing cabin pressure. We had the emergency landing and, I mean, obviously you don’t know the extent of what’s going on, but it seemed pretty serious.”
Johnson said the mood changed once the plane landed in Atlanta and remained so throughout the two-hour flight back home to San Antonio.
Some players went home before the game, but Mitch Johnson and most of the staff and players went directly to the Frost Bank Center after landing.
The Magic had been in San Antonio since Saturday morning awaiting the start of a two-game road trip that concludes Tuesday in Oklahoma City.
Orlando coach Jamahl Mosley prepared his team to expect San Antonio to come out energized despite the travel delays.
“I think sometimes those are the easier games because you’re just laying it all out there and you’re not worried about all the things that you have to walk into before,” Mosley said before tipoff. "You just show up and play. I think there is a freedom and a looseness that guys can play with in those situations.”
It proved prophetic as the Spurs built a double-digit lead in the opening five minutes and extended the advantage to 18 points in the first quarter.
“Don’t matter how you feel, it don’t matter how they feel," Keldon Johnson said. “We got to go out here and we got to get the job done and that’s what it’s about and that’s what we did tonight. We could have said we were very tired. We had a long layover, we didn’t get no rest or we was on the plane for this amount of time, but weren’t no excuses tonight.
"We went out there and we executed it and we played our brand of basketball and that’s big time to be able to come together and get it done.”
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San Antonio Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson signals to his players during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Orlando Magic in San Antonio, Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) moves the ball up court against the Orlando Magic during the second half of an NBA basketball game in San Antonio, Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
San Antonio Spurs forward Victor Wembanyama (1) scores against the Orlando Magic during the first half of an NBA basketball game in San Antonio, Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
A woman takes a photo on a snow-covered street, Sunday, Feb 1, 2026, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)
Snow covers parked cars, Sunday, Feb 1, 2026, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)
BEIRUT (AP) — When the Israel- Hezbollah war broke out in early March, Hussein Shuman fled the heavy bombardment of the southern suburbs of Beirut, but he didn’t bother trying to rent an apartment elsewhere.
In areas deemed “safe” because the Lebanese militant group has no presence, he feels that Shiite Muslims like him are not welcome. Residents regard them with suspicion as potential Hezbollah members, and landlords charge exorbitant prices to rent to displaced families.
Instead, the 35-year-old, who works at a perfume company, headed to central Beirut where he set up a small tent where he has been staying, along with his wife, 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter.
Shuman even rejected an offer from a friend who invited him to bring his family to the Christian mountain town of Zgharta. He preferred to remain in his tent, even though it has flooded twice in the past two weeks.
“By staying here I have my dignity and respect,” Shuman said, sitting on a chair near his tent as a barber gave him an open-air hair cut. “We will not stay in a place where we are going to be humiliated.”
In a country full of suspicion, the more than 1 million people — most of them Shiite — displaced as a result of Israel’s evacuation orders and airstrikes have limited options.
Some landlords in Christian areas refuse to rent to Shiites. Others demand inflated rents and deposits that few can afford. Fatima Zahra, 42, from Beirut’s southern suburbs, said she and her sister sold their finest jewelry to pay the $5,000 the landlord charged up front for two months’ rent.
In some Beirut neighborhoods, displaced people who can afford to pay high rents are only allowed to take the apartment after landlords inform the security agencies to check on whether the family has any links to Hezbollah.
Sectarian tensions are a sensitive issue in Lebanon because the country fought a 15-year civil war ending in 1990 that largely broke down along sectarian lines.
Social frictions have worsened since Israel’s targeted airstrikes killed Hezbollah officials or members of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in predominantly Christian, Sunni and Druze areas, raising fears among the hosts that Hezbollah members are mingling within the civilian population.
The Lebanese are deeply divided over Hezbollah’s wars with Israel, with many in the small nation blaming the Iran-backed group for dragging the country into a deadly conflict that has so far left more than 1,300 people dead and over 4,000 wounded. Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel two days after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, triggering the ongoing Middle East war.
The renewed war has caused widespread destruction and paralyzed the economy at a time when Lebanon is still in the throes of a historic economic crisis that broke out in late 2019. The country has not yet recovered from the last Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024.
In mid-March, an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in the town of Aramoun killed three people, prompting some local residents to call for the displaced to leave the area.
Days later, an airstrike on the nearby town of Bchamoun also killed three people, including a four-year-old girl, who were displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence.
In neither case did Israel announce the intended target of the strikes, but neighbors assumed that someone in the targeted apartments was a Hezbollah member.
“Had we known that they were linked to Hezbollah, we would have kicked them out,” an angry man who owns an apartment in the building in Bchamoun said at the scene.
In late March, a missile exploded over the predominantly Christian Keserwan region north of Beirut, with debris falling on different areas. Although the Lebanese army later said that it was an Iranian missile passing over Lebanon that fell, many initially assumed that it was an Israeli airstrike targeting displaced people.
No one was was hurt by the missile debris, but a group of young men attacked displaced Shiites in the district of Haret Sakher near the coastal city of Jounieh, calling for their eviction, before local officials intervened.
“We don’t want them here,” shouted a Haret Sakher resident shortly after the strike. He said that some of the displaced refer to their hosts as “Zionists,” accusing them of being aligned with Israel because they criticize Hezbollah for dragging the country into the conflict. He added: “We don’t want national coexistence.”
George Saadeh, a member of Jounieh’s municipal council, told The Associated Press that he had called on Haret Sakher residents to avoid any reaction “so that we can preserve civil peace.”
In a predominantly Christian area just north of Beirut, plans to house displaced people in an abandoned warehouse near the port were suspended last week after drawing backlash from lawmakers and residents.
“The Israeli targeting campaign has created a lot of paranoia,” said Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center. “If you see a displaced person, maybe you wonder, ‘What if this person is a target?’”
Fearing the tension could slip out of control, the army has beefed up its presence on the streets.
Last week, army commander Gen. Rudolphe Haikal toured Beirut and the southern city of Sidon and told troops that they should be “firm in the face of any attempt to undermine internal stability,” the army said in a statement.
Police forces, including a SWAT unit, were deployed at major intersections in the capital to preserve peace and prevent any friction between the displaced and locals. Police patrols pass through the tent city by Beirut’s coast where Shuman and his family are staying.
An official at the municipality of the predominantly Sunni town of Naameh, just south of Beirut, said that they have received thousands of people displaced from southern Lebanon.
The official said that in order to avoid tensions, they opened a school in one district for displaced Shiites and another in a different neighborhood for people displaced from Sunni border villages.
“There are concerns among people,” that conflict could break out said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
With the Israeli airstrikes and ground invasion mainly targeting Shiite areas, U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, a Lebanese-American, was criticized for stoking sectarianism. He told reporters in late March that the U.S. had asked Israel for a commitment that Christian villages in southern Lebanon will not be attacked.
“We have asked the Israelis to leave Christian villages in the south alone and they told us that they will not touch Christian villages,” Issa said. However, he added, “They (Israelis) said that they cannot guarantee” that the villages would be left alone “if there is infiltration into these villages” by Hezbollah members.
Several Christian villages in southern Lebanon have asked displaced Shiites who were sheltering there to leave, fearing that their presence might trigger Israeli attacks.
Legislator Taymour Joumblatt who is the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, the largest Druze-led political group in the country, said that the biggest concern in the country now is “strife.”
“The most important thing is to reduce sectarian pressures on the ground,” Joumblatt said. “Our Shiites brothers are part of this country and our humanitarian duty is to help them.”
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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre contributed to this report from Beirut.
FILE — A displaced woman who fled Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, carries her belonging as she moves to a better spot to shelter from the rain, past an Arabic anti-war poster that reads, "Sacrificing for whom? Lebanon does not need war," in Beirut, Saturday, March 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
FILE — A child walks past tents sheltering people displaced by Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, along the Beirut waterfront in Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)
Special forces police officers deployed amid tensions between people displaced by Israeli strikes and local residents in Beirut neighborhoods, Lebanon, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
File — Smoke rises from Israeli airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
