Russell Westbrook, with one of his best performances in the season, has secured his sixth consecutive victory over Thunder, while the Warriors once again dominated against Minnesota. Miami embarrassed himself against Sacramento, the nuggets got rid of New York.
Miami is in the middle of the fight for the home advantage in the east, the lead to 5th place (Indiana) is only one game. The Kings, on the other hand, are – once again – a part of the Western Conference and have long since had nothing to do with playoff combat. On top of that, they hadn’t won in Miami since 2001 (!), so the roles in this game were quite clearly distributed.
And then came De’ Aaron Fox. There were three seconds left on the clock, the No. 5-pick came intoxicated, grabbed an offensive rebound and dodged the ball through the Reuse – it was the end of a 17:4-run of the Kings and at the same time the winner of the game.”I just attacked the board and showed my athletics,”commented Fox, who wasn’t even blocked out in his action.
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Afterwards, Heat-Coach Erik Spoelstra was furious about the Laissez-Faire attitude of his team in the final minutes:”We didn’t even jump up,” says Spoelstra. One of them went to the ball and everyone else was just watching. One last attempt by Josh Richardson was still missing, so Heat couldn’t fix their mistake.
That had a lot to do with their miserable quota (38 percent from the field). Best man was once again Goran Dragic (23 points), Wayne Ellington came on 20 points. Hassan Whiteside scored 8 points and 13 rebounds, but missed the final minutes because he had fouled out. Top scorer among the guests was Buddy Hield with 24 points from the bank, Fox scored 14 points.
Who would have done that on the first day? December expected? At that point in time, the Thunders had only scored 8 wins from 20 games – after their victory over Washington, 20 of the last 28 games were won. You’d think so. Against the Wizards, a certain reigning MVP once again played like a very hot MVP candidate: Russell Westbrook showed his best match of the entire season with 46 points (19/29 FG).
OKC had almost everything under control at the interval, but in the third quarter Washington fought back on the shoulders of Bradley Beal (41 points) who was also strong as well. Then came the Westbrook show. In the fourth quarter alone, Russ pocketed nine of his eleven throws and scored 21 points. In the end, he made sure that OKC scored the sixth victory in a row.
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This inspired Carmelo Anthony (13 points):”Sometimes you catch yourself staring at him, and then I have to remember:’ I am now playing with someone who can take over the game as well.'” The same was probably true for Paul George, who hung up 18 points and after his All-Star-Snub got a lot of praise again, this time from wizards coach Scott Brooks,”he said. He’s the best two-way player in the league.”
In this match, however, PG-13 – like all the others – was overshadowed by Westbrook. Besides Beal, John Wall (21 points, 12 assists) and Markieff Morris (20) couldn’t change that. Among other things, this was due to a lack of support from the bank (29:15 bank points for OKC).
Page 1: Westbrook beats Washington, Miami embarrasses himself
Page 2: Warriors trio is on fire, Denver cleans the Knicks