Sports
High-scoring Cavaliers put unbeaten streak on line vs. Magic
Oct 30, 2024; Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Cleveland Cavaliers forward Evan Mobley (4) warms up before the game between the Cavaliers and the Los Angeles Lakers at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. Mandatory Credit: Ken Blaze-Imagn Images Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson has made an immediate impact in his first season with the Cavaliers, who are off to the franchise’s best start since 2016-17.
After opening the season with five straight wins, the Cavaliers strive to remain unbeaten when they face the visiting Orlando Magic on Friday.
Orlando began its five-game road trip with a 102-99 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Wednesday after being held to 12 points in the fourth quarter.
The Magic will need a more consistent effort to keep pace with Cleveland, which has scored at least 110 points in all five games. The Cavaliers are thriving under Atkinson, who has made fourth-year forward Evan Mobley a centerpiece of the team’s offense.
“Sharing the ball and having Evan up at the top, being the distributor, he’s been doing an excellent job running our offense, basically,” Cleveland center Jarrett Allen said. “We put a lot through him. It just gets everybody open.”
Mobley scored 25 points in 19 minutes in a 134-110 win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday. Donovan Mitchell added 24 points and Allen recorded his third double-double of the season with 20 points and 17 rebounds.
Cleveland also received a spark off the bench from Caris LeVert, who scored 16 points in 22 minutes. The 30-year-old guard is shooting 68.8 percent from the field and 64.3 percent from 3-point range.
The Cavaliers began Thursday with the NBA’s top offensive rating at 123.4, just ahead of the Boston Celtics.
“We’ve got a ways to go,” Atkinson said. “We’re developing, we’re still learning each other. Still a work in progress. But feels like we’re headed in the right direction.”
Friday’s game features a rematch of last year’s Eastern Conference first-round playoff series, which Cleveland won in seven games.
Orlando forward Paolo Banchero is off to an impressive start after scoring 30-plus points in three of his first five games, including 50 on Monday against Indiana. However, Banchero was listed as questionable to face Cleveland due to a right abdominal strain.
Banchero had 31 points in Wednesdays’ loss to Chicago, while Jalen Suggs had 17 points, six rebounds, five assists and four steals. The Magic led by as many as 20 points in the first half before Chicago rallied in the third quarter and emerged with the victory.
“I think we settled too much, myself included, in that second half. Settling on too many jumpers as a team, not attacking the paint,” Banchero said. “But to their credit, they did a good job walling off and plugging the gaps in the second half.”
Orlando is shooting 34.6 percent from 3-point range and will need to improve on that mark against Cleveland, which leads the league at 41.1 percent.
Guard Gary Harris said the Magic have made 3-point shooting a point of emphasis this season. Orlando is one of 10 teams averaging at least 40 3-point attempts, and Harris said the goal is to maintain that pace.
“We definitely have to get up more threes,” Harris said. “You see how the league is trending, getting up shots. We definitely harped on the spacing all summer, especially in training camp. Just trying to keep the spacing, so if we have open shots, open looks, we take them. Then if we don’t, we give space for our guys to work.”
Orlando is monitoring the status of forward Franz Wagner, who has been limited in the past two games due to illness. He had seven points, three rebounds and four assists in 23 minutes against Chicago before exiting early in the fourth quarter. He is officially questionable for Friday.
–Field Level Media
Sports
Knicks and Nuggets Blow Big Leads: What Went Wrong in Game 2?
Roughly 5,000 feet of elevation separate Denver and New York City.
Still, gravity works the same regardless of where one stands. Just ask the NBA teams in both towns.
“You get too high, and you get, I don’t want to say cocky, but feeling yourself,” Nuggets guard Tim Hardaway Jr. said.
That sensation went south on either side of the country Monday night.
After squandering sizable leads that would have cemented commanding 2-0 advantages in their respective first-round playoff series, the Nuggets and Knicks now find themselves bracing for a fight.
Should their opponents ultimately have their number, Denver and New York will look back with disdain on 19 and 14. Those were the Game 2 cushions the teams coughed up as the No. 3 seeds in the Eastern and Western Conference.
“It’s a game we should’ve won,” Knicks guard Josh Hart said. “In the playoffs, we can’t give away games.”
Be that as it may, the Knicks did just that against the Atlanta Hawks. They controlled the outcome for much of the night and took a 12-point edge into the fourth quarter after leading by as many as 14.
Then New York shot 5-for-22 from the floor in the final 12 minutes compared to 10-for-15 for Atlanta. Fighting through vulgar chants from the Madison Square Garden faithful, Hawks star CJ McCullom scored six straight points down the stretch during one key sequence on the way to a game-high 32.
“In that fourth quarter, you could tell [the Hawks] were playing with a level of desperation,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said. “There were four 50-50 balls, and they got three of the four. We always use that stat to gauge the level of aggression in a game. In that fourth quarter, their aggression stepped up.”
New York’s melted at the same time. How many late possessions saw the Knicks pass or hold the ball around the perimeter before settling for subpar looks from 3-point range? The Knicks went 3-for-11 from deep as part of their flop.
Denver led the Minnesota Timberwolves by 19 points early in the second quarter before crumbling. The Nuggets still were ahead by three points to start the fourth quarter but a combined 2-for-12 shooting effort from pillars Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray in the final 12 minutes took a toll.
“I feel like we had the game in hand, and then we just didn’t make our shots,” Murray said.
As with the Knicks and Hawks, the reversal of fortunes stemmed both from the hosts’ miscues and an outstanding effort from a visiting player, as Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards had 30 points.
“Great leadership, positive,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “He recognized he needed to get into attack mode and get downhill a little bit more. He did that.”
The Knicks and Nuggets no doubt sensed the need to amp up their own urgency as things started slipping away Monday.
That neither could act upon it didn’t signal the end for either New York or Denver, of course. But now there’s unnecessary added weight for the climb back to the top.
Sports
Pistons seek return to identity vs. Magic after Game 1 shocker
Apr 19, 2026; Detroit, Michigan, USA; Detroit Pistons forward Tobias Harris (12) is defended by Orlando Magic guard Desmond Bane (3) in the second half during the 2026 NBA Playoffs at Little Caesars Arena. Mandatory Credit: Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images After an exceptional regular season, this wasn’t the start to the NBA playoffs that the Detroit Pistons envisioned.
Reeling from a stunning Game 1 loss in which only two players reached double figures, the Eastern Conference’s top seed heads into Game 2 Wednesday against the visiting Orlando Magic facing early pressure to reset the best-of-seven series.
The eighth-seeded Magic controlled the opener from the start, never trailing and leaning on a balanced offensive attack. Paolo Banchero led the way with 23 points while Franz Wagner scored 11 of his 19 in the fourth quarter to help close out the 112-101 win.
For Detroit, the issue wasn’t just the loss — it was how it happened. The Pistons never established their defensive identity and struggled to find consistent offense beyond star guard Cade Cunningham, two areas that will be central entering Game 2.
“It starts, always, with us defensively,” said Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff. “When you go back and watch the film of that (game), we weren’t ourselves defensively. The telling tale is typically when we play them, they go to the free-throw line a ton.
“… We went 38 (times) but they went 19. So that means we weren’t playing our brand of basketball, being physical, being handsy, being aggressive. That kind of sets the tone for us.”
Offensively, the Pistons leaned on Cunningham, who scored 39 points, but got little other support — scoring their fewest points in nearly three months, since a loss to the Phoenix Suns on Jan. 29. Detroit will need more help from All-Star center Jalen Duren, who was held to just eight points and seven rebounds in Game 1.
“They came out ready from the jump,” Duren said. “We didn’t really meet their intensity. They’ve been playing with their backs against the walls the last few weeks, so they were already kind of already rolling. I think we just got to do a better job meeting that intensity.”
Duren said the Pistons remain confident despite the loss, which extended their home playoff losing streak to 11 games, the longest in NBA history.
“We know the type of team we are,” Duren said. “We feel like we’re the better team. We know that we’ve just got to make adjustments and come out smarter, come out playing harder.”
Orlando coach Jamahl Mosley said he has talked to his team about not becoming too overconfident coming off Sunday’s win.
“It’s one game at a time,” Mosley said of his message to the team. “It’s the reality that, yeah, you did get the Game 1 win, but now you have to go and figure out how to get a Game 2 (win). There’s going to be, obviously, the positive talk about what you’ve done, and thinking there’s reasons to celebrate, but at the end of the day, it’s one game, and that’s the most important piece that we’ve talked about: just taking it one game at a time.”
Banchero said the team has received the message, and he believes the key for the Magic is to play defense like they did in the opener.
“I thought we were on a string, just communicating, talking out coverages,” Banchero said. “I think it’s just going to continue to take that, being aggressive, being the aggressors on defense and just not trying to give them much. Obviously they’re going to make shots, but just not trying to give them any free looks.”
–Field Level Media
Sports
Lynx star Napheesa Collier (ankle) targets June for on-court work
Mar 2, 2026; Brooklyn, NY, USA; Unrivaled Co-founder Napheesa Collier at Barclay’s Center. Mandatory Credit: Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images The Minnesota Lynx said Tuesday that star forward Napheesa Collier’s rehab from left ankle surgery is “progressing as expected,” and she could resume on-court activities in early June.
The team plans to release updates on Collier’s progress when available.
The timeline means Collier will miss, at minimum, the first month of the WNBA season, which begins May 10 for the Lynx.
Collier underwent surgery on her ankle on March 24 after sustaining a severe injury during the 2025 playoffs. Per reports at the time, she sustained a Grade 2 tear of three ligaments in the ankle and a muscle in her left shin on a collision during Game 3 of the playoff semifinal series vs. Phoenix.
Collier, 29, averaged a career-high 22.9 points and shot 40.3% from 3-point range to go with 7.3 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 1.6 steals and 1.5 blocks per game last year. The back-to-back WNBA Most Valuable Player runner-up, Collier is a five-time All-Star and earned MVP honors in the 2024 Commissioner’s Cup final and the 2025 All-Star Game.
–Field Level Media
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