Aaron Gordon returns again in the clutch. With less than 30 seconds in the regulations, Gordon struck a crucial 3 to equalize the Denver Nuggets with Oklahoma Thunder and send the match 3 in overtime, where Denver took an advance of 113-104 for the victory. After a massive defeat on Wednesday, the physical victory tightened on Friday evening gave the Nuggets an advance of 2-1 on the Thunder in the semi-final of the conference.
In Indianapolis, the Cleveland horsemen won their first victory against the Indiana Pacers, going 126-104 to a 43-point match by Donovan Mitchell and reducing the Indiana series to 2-1.
The defense of the Thunder maintained Nikola Jokić at 20 points with eight reversals, while Jamal Murray paved the way in Denver with 27 points, eight assists and four rebounds.
While Mitchell led the charge of Cleveland, he and the riders were stimulated by the return of three key players, including the starters Darius Garland and Evan Mobley. Garland encountered big problems in the first half, but still scored 10 points, while Mobley added 18 to accompany his 13 rebounds, four assists, three interceptions and three blocks.
Indiana has joined a slow start and briefly took the lead in the second quarter. However, Tyrese Haliburton’s star, who hit the 3 series’s second match in the series’s second game had difficulty and finished with only four defeat points.
Nuggets 113, Thunder 104
(Nuggets Lead Series 2-1)
The nuggets can close
Denver is not the deeper team of this series. You can certainly say that they are not the most talented team in this series. But these Nuggets have a championship post which was clearly obvious in the three games of this series. The Nuggets simply know what to do in the section of the matches, and the Thunder experienced difficulties in the two tight games of the series.
The nuggets started overtime with a 7-0 race, a push whose Oklahoma City would not recover. Denver’s offensive will still go to his match by two men from Murray and Jokić in the last five minutes. On the other hand, Oklahoma City was not offensive in the last minutes of regulation or in overtime. This is the reason why the Nuggets have a 2-1 lead in this series, and are two victories of an important second-round upheaval. – Tony Jones, editor
Lu sleeps is struggling in attack
For all useful purposes, Lu sleeps, whose main work of this series is to hunt Jamal Murray for 48 minutes, is to do solid work on the defensive level. Murray ended the evening with 27 points on 19 shots (9 made goals on the ground), but most of his score came from a sleeping, when he was out of the ground, died out or at the Launarae francs. One night when Jokić was also held at a rare night with low efficiency, the attempts to be dorm to delay the inevitable rating clusters of Murray were admirable.
But at the other end, the effectiveness of sleeping soil spacing dropped during these eliminatory series, which does a lot of thunder. Dort finished with only 3 points, missing its four 3s. Before this evening, Dort drew 29.3% out of 3 in playoffs, after finishing the regularly better regular season (41.2% out of 5.8 attempts per match).
Sometimes sleeps looked like a man without confidence in his offensive game, passing decent looks of the perimeter and lacking simple shots around the edge. The Thunder took the pride of the offensive to abandon good shots for the big ones, but by the metrics, Oklahoma City was in fact a better defensive team when Dort was on the bench.
Due to his offensive difficulties, sleeps was stuck on the bench for a first critical half of the fourth, Alex Caruso obtaining his minutes. Dort would eventually let off steam from the match with 36 seconds to play in overtime, the game already decided. He probably heads for an all-start team this season, but he will have to get out of his crisis at the other end of the ground. Otherwise, the Thunder season could be too prematurely. – Kelly Iko, editor
Cavaliers 126, Pacers 104
(Pacers lead series 2-1)
A complete victory
No wild return and no missing star in the action.
Just a complete and courageous victory by the Cavs, who needed it desperately.
As Athletics On Thursday, Garland (Big Big Toe), Mobley (the ankle, scratchy) and’Andre Hunter (thumb of the wake) all tried match 3. The individual results were mixed, but having them seemed collectively to bring together a team that had been such a coherent group all season and began to show some cracks after two difficult losses and questions about their absences.
Mobley played as the defensive player of the year of the NBA and probably an All-NBA selection. The jump capacity, the presence in the painting, the score and the ability to run the ground were all there from Mobley, which showed practically no effect of the injury he suffered by walking on the foot of Myles Turner in match 1.
Garland pulled 3 out of 11 and made four faults in the first half. He finished with 10 points, seemed to be reinstated in the third quarter but returned to the match and committed four reversals. He had not played for more than two weeks either and his presence was felt as a ball manager who could manage the pressure of the Pacers.
Hunter pulled 2 out of 6 for eight points in 20 minutes. His thumb is always swollen but, without asking him, it is difficult to say if he was really embarrassed by the injury. The biggest story, with regard to Hunter, is in as a bench player, it is part of a reserve unit which is being ahead of the Pacers. Bennedict Mathurin gave Indiana 23 points on the bench and TJ McConnell added 12 points. Ty Jerome is still struggling in Cleveland, and Kenny Atkinson has cut some of the usual minutes of Jérôme and gave them to Sam Merrill.
Otherwise, the Pacers reduced a huge 11 -point deficit in the fourth quarter before Mitchell ended their momentum. Mitchell scored 14 in the fourth quarter and the collapse that this team suffered in match 2 never materialized.
The Cavs also broke out a 3-2 zone which seemed to frustrate the endless Pacers – a solid match adjustment in the match for Atkinson. – Joe Vardon, principal writer
Beaten on the glass
After the series in the series, the Pacers mentioned their need to improve the glass. In match 1, they finished with seven total offensive rebounds and in match 2, there was a slight improvement at 11. But Friday evening, they were killed, once again, on the offensive glass. In the first half, they had two offensive rebounds with four second chance points, while Cleveland managed 13 offensive rebounds and 21 second chance points. In the second half, they added only two offensive rebounds and finished with four points in total (nine second chance points). Although this is not all the difference, it is certainly a point of pain for Indiana, which needs all the chances and score stops.
The Pacers also had trouble beyond the arc. In the first half, they drew 27.8% (5 out of 18) from 3 and at a given time, 13 consecutive points of 3 points, including the last 11 of the first half and the first two of the second. The second half was not much better. The Indiana only made three of the eight attempts in 3 points in the third quarter and finished with nine attempts of 3 points on 30 chances. – Shakeia Taylor, editor
Star in difficulty
Three days after formulating the 3 winning pointer of the match which gave the Pacers an advance of 2-0 in their series of second round against the Cavs, Haliburton had trouble at power on Friday evening. The leader of the Indiana stars ended with a career in four -point playoffs, marking the third time that he has scored less than 10 points in the playoffs. He pulled 2 for 8 in the field (25%), which was the second weakest brand in his career in playoffs, and only collected five assists.
Haliburton awkwardly landed on his left wrist in match 2, obtained an x -ray in the middle of the game and returned to the field with his strongly recorded wrist before forming the winner of the match. He insisted that he was “good” in training on Thursday, but his wrist was recorded again on Friday and that may have contributed to his quiet evening.
Friday’s defeat also marked the first time that the Pacers lost a home elimination match in which Haliburton played. Indiana was previously 9-0 with Haliburton in the programming, with its only losses in the playoffs in the last two years in the match of the final of the Eastern Conference of last season against the Celtics. Boston swept the Indiana, but Haliburton was sidelined for the last two games at Gainbridge Fieldhouse due to an injury to the hamstrings. Pacers Pr did not put Haliburton available to the media after the loss of 22 points on Friday. – James Boyd, editor
(Photo: Ron Chenoy / Imagn Images)
