The New York Knicks scored 18 unanswered points on the way to a 109-93 win against the Cleveland Cavaliers as they took a 2-0 lead in their best-of-seven Eastern Conference final.<\/p>\n
The score was tied at 53-53 when the Knicks pulled away at their Madison Square Garden home to take a 71-53 lead on the way to a ninth straight victory.<\/p>\n
Josh Hart scored 26 points, including five three-pointers, for the home side as he racked up a career-high tally for a play-off game, while team-mate Jalen Brunson added 19 points and 14 assists.<\/p>\n
The Knicks, who last reached the NBA Finals match in 1999 and have not been champions since 1973, also had Mikal Bridges scoring 19 points and Karl-Anthony Towns 18. <\/p>\n
“We don’t really care who gets the shine, the shots, the minutes, those kind of things – we’re focused on winning,” Hart said. <\/p>\n
“I think everyone is willing to sacrifice their own personal agendas or performance for the betterment of the team. And when you have a group of guys that do that, sky’s the limit.”<\/p>\n
Donovan Mitchell scored 26 points for the Cavaliers and James Harden contributed 18 for the visiting side, who went 2-0 down to the Detroit Pistons in the last round before emerging 4-3 series winners.<\/p>\n
“This isn’t our first time facing adversity,” Mitchell said. “We’ve been to two game sevens, so being down 2-0, it’s not the biggest challenge. <\/p>\n
“It’s right there. So let’s go ahead and take advantage of it.”<\/p>\n
Games three and four will take place in Cleveland on Saturday and Monday.<\/p>\n
The winners will play either the Oklahoma City Thunder or San Antonio Spurs, whose Western Conference final is tied at 1-1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The New York Knicks scored 18 unanswered points on the way to a 109-93 win against the Cleveland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-658155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}