2 games were played in the NBA on Sunday night and neither were close. Firstly in a series where not one of the 7 games produced a nail biter the Atlanta Hawks dispatched the Miami Heat 91-78 to win their first round series 4-3 and move onto a Eastern Conference Semi-Final with the number one seeded Cleveland Cavaliers. The Hawks won 3 of the 4 quarters of play in this game and by the time they lost one (in the 4th quarter) they were 16 points ahead. The Hawks really blew this one open when they outscored Miami 29-18 in the second quarter to end the first half 13 points up, a lead they didn’t let slip.
They were able to beat Miami despite having a shooting percentage marginally worse than their opponents with 40.8 percent while the Heat’s was slightly up at 41.3. This shows that they obviously took more shots (something that’s typical for this fast-paced Atlanta team), quite a lot of these misses were from the hands of Ronald Murray, who came off the bench and scored 15 points but only shot 4 of 14. Likewise Joe Johnson scored a team high 27 but missed 9 shooting 10-19. Other than those two Josh Smith dropped 21 and Mike Bibby had a slight off day with 11 points including 2 trademark 3 pointers.
On the other side fewer players got hot, Dwayne Wade led the Miami scoring with 31 points while Michael Beasley came off the bench to score 17 points. However apart from that there was only Udonis Haslem’s 14 poitns and 13 rebounds for his double double that stood out. A problem that’s plagued Miami all season has been their lack of depth and this problem shone last night, hopefully they’ll use this upcoming off-season to bring in some fresh talent while the Hawks go on to face the impossible task of Cleveland with home-court advantage. The Hawk’s first objective is to win one game especially after seeing the Cavs easily sweep the Detroit Pistons out of the play-offs in 4 games.
In the other game of the night Denver kicked off their Western Conference Semi-Final with the Dallas Mavericks with an easy home win despite some good first quarter play by the Mavs. Denver won this one 109-95 but were 8 points down at the end of the first quarter and had only scored 16 points, thankfully for them and their fans they escaped any thoughts of a first game loss with a 35 point second quarter that put them up by 4 at the half. After that they never looked in doubt and padded their lead in the second half. Starting center Nene top scored with 24 points while Carmelo Anthony was just behind with 23 but the Nuggets’ bench came up trumps with 39 points including J.R Smith who scored 15 and Anthony Carter, who dropped 12 in 22 minutes on court.
For Dallas the scoring was really limited to 4 players. Firstly Dirk Nowitzki top scored with 28 points and grabbed 10 rebounds for a double double while Jason Kidd and Josh Howard both had 15. The fourth player was Jason Terry who came off the bench to score 15 and collect 5 rebounds in 32 minutes on court and hit 3 of 7 from behind the arc. Like in the first round the Dallas Mavericks are having to cope without home court advantage (something they’ll have to do throughout the play-offs if they progress) but this time they’re facing the Nuggets who play a much quicker game than the San Antonio Spurs, who played into their hands. They have one more game in Denver before going back to Texas for two games and will hope to, at least, run Denver close in Game 2 so they can at least dream of another upset.
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This entry was postedon Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 2:22 amand is filed under NBA Basketball.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.2 Responses to “”
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