Throughout the postseason, New Orleans head coach Byron Scott said the key to moving on would be whether his team came out with more energy, with more aggression and intensity on the floor.

He was right. In the critical Game 7 Monday night in the New Orleans Arena, San Antonio’s old legs apparently weren’t old enough.

The Spurs outrebounded the Hornets 51-42 and in so doing, eliminated New Orleans from the NBA playoffs with a 91-82 win. San Antonio became the third team to win on the road in the conference semifinals round of the postseason.

Photo by Alex Brandon / The Associated Press

New Orleans' Chris Paul, left, and Jannero Pargo sit on the bench during a timeout in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the NBA Western Conference semifinal basketball playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs in New Orleans. The Spurs won 91-82.

"All series long, the team that dominated the boards won the games,” Scott said. “Tonight, they outworked us. They ran down loose rebounds. If you give a team like that second and third opportunities, they’re going to score.”

But it wasn’t the second-chance points that hurt New Orleans. The Hornets did, after all, get 15 second-chance points to San Antonio’s six.

It was their timing and it was that the Spurs picked up 38 defensive boards to New Orleans’ 31.

“They were pretty active all night and we had opportunities,” said Hornets point guard Chris Paul, who finished with 18 points and 14 assists before fouling out. “They outscrapped us a couple of times.”

Scott told the team prior to the game that rebounds was going to be the difference. It’s almost like he saw the writing on the wall. After the Spurs picked up five more rebounds in their Game 6 win, Scott knew that could be the difference Monday night.

Not the third quarter. Not the bench. Not the home crowd, which was 18,235 strong.

“If we let them outrebound, that’s the team that has won the game,” New Orleans guard Morris Peterson said. “Earlier they were more aggressive getting the rebounds.”

It wasn’t just the rebounds, though. It was what caused the rebounds to happen.

San Antonio held New Orleans to 40.2 percent shooting, including 4-of-17 from 3-point range.

In the third quarter, New Orleans couldn’t buy a basket, shooting 29.4 percent, hitting only five shots and didn’t pick up a single offensive rebound.

“We played a very good defensive game tonight and that’s what got us over,” Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich said. “We concentrated on the fact that might fuel our offense. We wanted to keep them off balance. We changed our defense more tonight than any other game. Maybe it helped a little bit.”

Said David West, who chipped in 20 points for New Orleans, “They outplayed us in the third. We felt like we played good enough or solid enough defensively. We just hit a bad spurt there. We couldn’t make any baskets.”

And now San Antonio moves on to the Western Conference finals against Los Angeles. New Orleans now has to sit out the rest of the postseason and wait for training camp to begin in the fall.

All the franchise records right now are of little consolation.

“We didn’t play like we wanted to, like we normally do,” Peterson said. “We didn’t play our brand of basketball.”

The Hornets will now have a couple of months to figure out how to get back here.

It might just start with rebounding.