The Los Angeles Lakers secured an NBA playoff spot even before taking to the court on Wednesday, then needed overtime of their own game to learn where they were seeded.
The Los Angeles Clippers also had to wait until the final minutes of the NBA regular season to learn their fate, clinching home-court advantage for their first-round series against Memphis.
The Grizzlies guaranteed the Lakers’ turbulent season would continue when they beat the Utah Jazz 86-70. The Lakers then moved up to the No. 7 seed by outlasting Houston 99-95 in overtime of their regular-season finale.
Without the injured Kobe Bryant, the Lakers are to face the No. 2 San Antonio Spurs on Sunday.
The Grizzlies were hoping their victory would give them home-court advantage against the Clippers, but Los Angeles earned it by winning 112-108 at Sacramento in what could be the Kings’ final game there.
The Clippers, who won their first Pacific Division title, earned the No. 4 seed and are to host the Grizzlies tomorrow in a rematch of their seven-game victory in the first round last year.
Carmelo Anthony won his first scoring title when he and Kevin Durant both sat out their games. The New York Knicks beat the Atlanta Hawks 98-92 without Anthony, while the Chicago Bulls took the No. 5 seed in the Eastern Conference and the Hawks settled for No. 6.
The playoffs are to open tomorrow with New York hosting the Boston Celtics, and Chicago visiting the Nets in the first post-season game in Brooklyn. The defending champions and top-seeded Miami Heat are to host the Milwaukee Bucks on Sunday, when the Hawks visit the Indiana Pacers.
Also in the West, the No. 3-seeded Denver Nuggets, a league-best 38-3 at home, host the No. 6-seeded Golden State Warriors tomorrow.
Anthony finished with 28.7 points per game in becoming the first Knicks player since Bernard King in 1984-1985 to win the scoring title. The Knicks went 54-28, their best season since 1996-97.
“He’s just been solid all the way across the board in everything he’s done for this team and that’s why we’re in the position we’re in today,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said.
Durant averaged 28.1 points, falling short in his bid to join Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain as the only players to win four straight scoring titles.
Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder are the No. 1 seeds in the West and will play the Houston Rockets and James Harden, whom the Thunder traded in the preseason.
“I certainly know going into this last stretch of the season, we had a lot of tough games on the road, a lot of good playoff teams,’’ Thunder coach Scott Brooks said. “We had a stretch there, it seems like every night was a game of a lot of implications on playoff positioning.”
“I like how we’re playing. You always want to play good basketball down the stretch. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have guaranteed success in the playoffs, but we know what we have to do and we’re looking forward to the challenge ahead of us.”
The Warriors, back in the playoffs for the first time since 2007, clinched the No. 6 spot by beating the Portland Trailblazers 99-88 as Stephen Curry set an NBA single-season record with 272 three-pointers.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier