Kyrie Irving scored 35 points, Cooper Flagg added 33 and the Dallas Mavericks rallied for a 116-111 victory over Houston, handing the Rockets their first loss of the season in an NBA Cup opener Friday night.<\/p>\n
Irving scored 26 of his points in the second half, including a jumper that put Dallas ahead for good at 102-100 and set up a tense final two minutes. Houston’s loss left idle Memphis (5-0) as the only remaining unbeaten team in the league.<\/p>\n
Kevin Durant scored 28 points, but the career 88% free throw shooter missed a pair with the Rockets trailing by two with 1:53 remaining. Amen Thompson did the same thing with 42 seconds to go after Dallas’ P.J. Washington threw the ball directly to him for a turnover.<\/p>\n
After each pair of misses, Flagg converted a clutch bucket on the other end, including a three-point play. Irving was 12 of 19 from the field, including 5 of 8 from 3-point range, and Flagg was 13 of 19.<\/p>\n
Daniel Gafford scored 18 points, including two clutch free throws with Dallas leading by one with 11 seconds remaining.<\/p>\n
The Mavericks held on down the stretch by fouling on purpose twice with a three-point lead in the final 10 seconds, and Irving hitting the free throws each time on the next possession.<\/p>\n
Irving finished 6 of 6 from the line, extending the NBA’s longest active streak of made free throws to 54 going back to before he was sidelined for 19 months by a torn ACL in his left knee.<\/p>\n
Jabari Smith Jr. scored 10 points of his 22 points in the second quarter, when Houston outscored Dallas 31-17 to turn a seven-point deficit into a seven-point lead.<\/p>\n
Fred VanVleet scored 16 points, and Thompson had 15 for Houston, which was just 24 of 33 on free throws.<\/p>\n
Up next<\/p>\n
Rockets: Host Thunder on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Mavericks: Host Kings on Monday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyrie Irving scored 35 points, Cooper Flagg added 33 and the Dallas Mavericks rallied for a 116-111 victory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,2582,103,3080],"class_list":["post-482079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-mavericks","tag-dallas-news","tag-nba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}