Kevin Durant made history as the Houston Rockets secured a 102-95 win over Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday night at the Toyota Center. <\/p>\n
Durant reached the 20-point threshold for the 1,000th time of his career, joining LeBron James, Karl Malone, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the only players in NBA history to do so.<\/p>\n
Durant finished with 26 points on 8-of-22 shooting, connecting on three of his seven attempts from behind the arc. While he only dished out three assists compared to five turnovers, he also picked up three steals. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Leonard scored 28 points and grabbed eight rebounds while shooting 7-of-19 from the field. <\/p>\n
Fans were impressed with Durant’s performance. <\/p>\n
The first half of Tuesday’s contest was particularly hard-fought, as neither team held a double-digit lead at any point throughout the first two quarters.<\/p>\n
At halftime, the Clippers held a narrow 52-51 edge.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles pushed its lead to three points early in the third quarter, but Houston immediately responded with a 12-4 run to jump back in front.<\/p>\n
The Rockets were able to stay on top for the remainder of the third quarter largely due to their defense, limiting the Clippers to just 20 points in the period.<\/p>\n
Houston continued to string together stops, eventually taking an 94-79 lead with just over five minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles responded by cutting the deficit to seven points with three minutes left in regulation, but couldn’t pull any closer before the game came to an end.<\/p>\n
Alperen \u015eeng\u00fcn put together an efficient performance for the Rockets, scoring 22 points on 9-of-14 shooting. \u015eeng\u00fcn also grabbed seven rebounds and tallied a team-high five assists.<\/p>\n
Reed Sheppard chipped in with 16 points off the bench as well.<\/p>\n
Leonard didn’t receive much help from his teammates offensively, as John Collins was the only other Clipper to finish with a double-digit scoring total. Los Angeles shot just 26.7 percent from three as a team.<\/p>\n
The Rockets moved to 33-19 with the win, while the Clippers fell to 25-28.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kevin Durant made history as the Houston Rockets secured a 102-95 win over Kawhi Leonard and the Los…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-467470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}