The Milwaukee Bucks still have not figured out how to slow down Nikola Vucevic, although they did shut down his Orlando Magic teammates well enough to tie the Eastern Conference first-round series.
Giannis Antetokounmpo had 28 points and 20 rebounds as Milwaukee rode a fast start to beat the Magic 111-96 on Thursday in game 2.
The victory came two days after the team that boasted the NBA’s best regular-season record opened the playoffs by losing 122-110 to Orlando.
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“There’s an urgency,” Antetokounmpo said. “I’m not going to say there’s a fear factor — being down — but you know you have to be urgent.”
Milwaukee bounced back on Thursday, building a 23-point lead in the first half, although Orlando got the margin down to nine in the fourth quarter.
Orlando had no points in the paint for the entire first quarter and went nearly eight minutes without a basket during a first-half stretch.
Photo: AP
Antetokounmpo said that Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer set the tone for Thursday’s game with the message he delivered during a film session.
“He told us if we want to win and if we want to go far and if we want to be us, we’ve got to play defense, and we didn’t do that in the first game,” Antetokounmpo said. “I think everybody took that personally. Nobody liked that. Nobody wants to hear that he’s not playing hard enough, so I think whole team came out playing hard. Everybody was playing hard.”
Brook Lopez scored 20 points and Pat Connaughton had 15 on 5-of-8 three-point shooting for Milwaukee. Eric Bledsoe had 13 points and Donte DiVincenzo added 11.
Photo: AP
The Bucks withstood another huge effort from Vucevic, who followed up his 35-point effort in the opener by scoring 32 points. Nobody else on the Magic scored more than 12.
“He’s a very, very good player,” Budenholzer said. “We have a ton of respect for him, but I think overall our defense was in a good place.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Lakers also scored a convincing victory.
LeBron James and the Lakers, seeded first in the Western Conference, thumped the Portland Trail Blazers 111-88 to level their best-of-seven series at 1-1.
Anthony Davis, who struggled through an eight-of-24 shooting night in the Lakers’ game 1 loss to Portland, led Los Angeles with 31 points on 13 of 21 shooting and pulled down 11 rebounds in 29 minutes.
He is the first Laker since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to score more than 30 points in a playoff game in less than 30 minutes of action.
“He was just aggressive from the beginning of the game,” James said of Davis. “He wasn’t passive at all, looked for his shots. He did a great job of rebounding as well, got some put-backs.”
James scored just 10 points, but his quiet night was no problem for a Lakers team that closed the first half on a 12-2 scoring run for a 17-point halftime lead.
“We knew we had to not have as many defensive lapses,” James said. “When you have a defensive strategy you have to execute that strategy for 48 minutes and I think we did a great job of that tonight,” he said after the Lakers held the Blazers to 40 percent shooting overall and just 27.6 percent from three-point range.
Portland star Damian Lillard exited with less than two minutes remaining in the third after dislocating his left index finger — apparently when he banged his hand against Davis’ foot while reaching for the ball.
Lillard, who torched the Lakers for 34 points in game 1, finished with 18.
The Blazers said X-rays on Lillard’s hand were negative.
The Houston Rockets and the Miami Heat both took commanding 2-0 leads in their series.
Houston beat the Oklahoma City Thunder 111-98, while Miami won 109-100 over the Indiana Pacers.
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