The Golden State Warriors showed their championship mettle Saturday, roaring back to rout the Houston Rockets 115-86 to force a decisive Game 7 in the NBA Western Conference finals.
Klay Thompson scored 35 points, Stephen Curry scored 29 and Kevin Durant added 23 as the Warriors rallied from a 17-point first-quarter deficit to knot the best-of-seven series at 3-3 — and keep their bid to reach a fourth straight championship series alive.
“I don’t want to go home,” said Thompson, who made nine three-pointers. “We worked too hard this season to go home.”
Photo: AP
However, in the early going it looked like the Warriors would do just that.
The Rockets, who led the league with 65 regular season wins, ran roughshod over Golden State in the opening quarter as they raced to a 39-22 lead.
Houston’s Most Valuable Player candidate James Harden dominated early, finishing with 32 points, nine assists and seven rebounds.
However, the Warriors defense clamped down on Harden in the second half and the Rockets felt the absence of injured point guard Chris Paul, who suffered a strained right hamstring in the Rockets’ Game 5 victory.
“I thought Klay was amazing tonight, not just for 35 points and the nine threes, but his defense,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “The guy’s a machine.”
The Warriors showed signs of life in the second quarter, putting together a 23-11 scoring run and trimming the deficit to five points, but they trailed 61-51 at halftime.
Then came one of their trademark third-quarter surges. Golden State opened the second half on an 11-0 scoring run, taking the lead for the first time since the opening minutes when Curry drained a three-pointer for a 62-61 advantage.
Soon, the rout was on.
“I think the turnovers got them going,” said Houston coach Mike D’Antoni, whose team finished with 21 turnovers. “Then once you get them going and they get out of the box — we didn’t communicate really well two or three times, and then they just got on a roll. You get these guys on a roll, and they can hurt you.”
Kerr was at a loss to explain the early defensive lapses.
“We lost people in transition. We didn’t communicate. We gave up wide-open threes,” he said. “It was sort of a head scratcher.”
The Warriors outscored the Rockets 64-25 in the second half, limiting Harden to 10 points after the break.
Eric Gordon, starting in place of Paul, scored just three of his 19 points after the interval.
“I think once we settled down defensively and started staying with people and not making mistakes in transition, then we wore them down a little bit,” Kerr said.
The lack of defensive focus that plagued Golden State early was mirrored by the Rockets late.
“A lot of miscommunication,” Harden said. “That first quarter we did a really good job of communicating, limiting them on threes, just contesting everything, making everything difficult.”
Although they couldn’t keep that up, the Rockets remain confident they can close out the series on their home floor on Monday and return to the NBA Finals for the first time since Houston won back-to-back titles in 1994 and 1995, Harden said.
“Nothing changes for us,” Harden said. “We know what we have to do. We’re still confident. We’re a confident group. We’ve just got one chance.”
The winner of the series will face either the Cleveland Cavaliers or Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals.
The Eastern Conference final is also tied at three games apiece.
SS Lazio on Monday fired the far-right sympathizer who handles their eagle mascot after he posted online a series of videos and pictures of his erect penis. Falconer Juan Bernabe, who has been present at Lazio home matches with Olimpia the eagle since the 2010-2011 season, posted the footage on social media after having surgery on Saturday to implant a penile prosthesis to improve his sexual performance. Lazio said that they had “terminated, with immediate effect” their relationship with Bernabe “due to the seriousness of his conduct,” adding that they were “shocked” by the images. The Serie A club added that Bernabe’s dismissal
Doping fears prevented former US Open champion Emma Raducanu from treating insect bites on the eve of the Australian Open, she said, with players increasingly wary about ingesting contaminated substances. The British player was speaking in the wake of high-profile doping cases involving Iga Swiatak and Jannik Sinner. “I would say all of us are probably quite sensitive to what we take on board, what we use,” the 22-year-old said, recalling an incident on Friday. “I got really badly bitten by, I don’t know what, like ants, mosquitoes, something. I’m allergic, I guess,” she added. The bites “flared up and swelled up really a
Dubbed a “motorway for cyclists” where avid amateurs can chase Tadej Pogacar up mountains teeming with the highest concentration of professional cyclists per square kilometer in the world, Spain’s Costa Blanca has forged a new reputation for itself in the past few years. Long known as the ideal summer destination for those in search of sun, sea and sand, the stretch of coast between Valencia and Alicante now has a winter vocation too. During the season break in December and January, the region experiences an invasion of cyclists. Star names such as three-time Tour de France winner Pogacar, Remco Evenepoel and Julian Alaphilippe
‘TOUGH TO BREATHE’: Tunisian three-time Grand Slam finalist Ons Jabeur suffered an asthma attack in her 7-5, 6-3 victory over Colombia’s Camila Osorio Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei yesterday cruised into the second round of the women’s doubles at the Australian Open, while Iga Swiatek romped into a third-round women’s singles showdown with Emma Raducanu and Taylor Fritz was just as emphatic in his pursuit of a maiden Grand Slam title. Hsieh and Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia, the third seeds, defeated Slovakia’s Tereza Mihalikova and Olivia Nicholls of Britain 7-5, 6-2 in 90 minutes in Melbourne. Ostapenko and Hsieh — who won the women’s doubles and mixed doubles at the Australian Open last year — hit 25 winners and converted five of nine break points to set
RSS