Jeff Teague scored 25 points to lead the Atlanta Hawks to a 107-88 rout of the reeling Indiana Pacers, who were held to a club record low of 23 points in the first half of an embarrassing performance on their home floor on Sunday.
The NBA’s best home team have now lost four of five and fell a full game behind the Miami Heat in their quest for the No. 1 playoff seed in the Eastern Conference.
At the Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Paul George scored 18 points and David West had 17 on a night in which All-Star center Roy Hibbert sat out the last 30 minutes.
The Pacers could not get closer than 13 after falling into a 14-point hole midway through the first quarter. The team’s previous low in first-half points a was 27 against the Los Angeles Clippers on Nov. 10, 2004.
The Hawks have won three of four and extended their lead over the Knicks for the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference to two games after New York lost to Miami on Sunday.
The Heat survived a three-point barrage from J.R. Smith to deal the Knicks’ playoff hopes a big blow with a 102-91 victory, in which LeBron James scored 38 points and Mario Chalmers added 15 for Miami.
Smith had a Knicks-record 10 three-pointers on an NBA-record 22 attempts to finish on 32 points, while Carmelo Anthony managed only 13 points on four-for-17 shooting.
In other games with playoff implications, the Phoenix Suns toppled the Oklahoma City Thunder 122-115 to pull a game ahead of the Memphis Grizzlies for the No. 8 playoff spot in the West, while the Dallas Mavericks kept their playoff position by beating the Sacramento Kings 93-91.
Oklahoma City’s Kevin Durant scored 38 points in his 41st straight game of 25 or more, but Phoenix got 26 points from Goran Dragic and 24 from Gerald Green to seal the win.
Durant moved ahead of Michael Jordan with the third-longest such streak in NBA history and longest since Oscar Robertson did it for 46 in a row in the 1963-1964 season.
P.J. Tucker scored a career-high 22 points for the Suns, who took the season series from the Thunder 2-1.
The Mavericks won the fourth in five games to stay in seventh place in the Western Conference after their fifth straight road victory.
Monta Ellis scored eight of his 23 points in the fourth quarter, Vince Carter added 17 points and Dirk Nowitzki had 15 points for Dallas.
Meanwhile, Memphis lost ground in the Western playoff race with a 112-92 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in which Kawhi Leonard matched his career high with 26 points and Manu Ginobili had a season-high 26 for the Spurs, who lost Tony Parker to back spasms in the first quarter.
Elsewhere in the NBA, the Portland Trail Blazers clinched their first playoff appearance in three seasons with a 100-94 win over the New Orleans Pelicans and the Los Angeles Clippers pulled within one game of Oklahoma City in the West with a 120-97 rout of the Lakers.
Also, the Golden State Warriors beat the Utah Jazz 130-102 to move 19 games over .500 for the first time in 20 years, as the Rockets rallied to beat the Nuggets 130-125.
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