Oklahoma City – Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 34 points, and the Oklahoma City Thunder routed the Minnesota Timberwolves 124-94 on Wednesday night to win the Western Conference finals series 4-1 and advance to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2012.
Chet Holmgren had 22 points, seven rebounds and three blocks and Jalen Williams added 19 points and eight rebounds for the Thunder.
A fanbase that had suffered through the loss of Kevin Durant through free agency in 2016 and a rebuild that took the team near the bottom of the league’s standings just four years ago let loose in the fourth quarter when the Thunder sat their starters with 5:14 remaining and a 108-74 lead.
Oklahoma City will play the Indiana Pacers or New York Knicks in the finals. Indiana leads the Eastern Conference finals series 3-1 with Game 5 to be played in New York City on Thursday. Oklahoma City will have homecourt advantage when the Finals begin on June 5 because of its league-best 68-14 regular-season record.
Julius Randle scored 24 points and Anthony Edwards added 19 for the Timberwolves, who shot just 41.2% from the field and committed 21 turnovers.
Oklahoma City opened the game on an 11-3 run and extended the advantage throughout the first quarter. Cason Wallace drained a 3-pointer as the first quarter expired to put the Thunder up 26-9 at the end of the period.
Oklahoma City led 65-32 at halftime and 88-62 heading into the fourth quarter.
Pacers are a win from the NBA Finals
New York – The Indiana Pacers need just one win to reach the NBA Finals and they already have two of them at Madison Square Garden in this series.
They can finish off the New York Knicks quickly, just like they play. But while the Pacers like their games fast, they were trying not to get ahead of themselves as they prepared for Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals on Thursday night.
“We’re still pretty young so we’re learning by some of the experience that we’re getting right now, but we’ve got to stay in the moment,” coach Rick Carlisle said. “We’ve got to keep our eye on the ball and go day to day and moment to moment here.”
Indiana opened a 3-1 lead with a 130-121 victory Tuesday behind Tyrese Haliburton, who had 32 points, 15 assists and 12 rebounds without a turnover, the first 30-15-10 game in the postseason with no turnovers since they were tracked beginning in 1977-78.
The Pacers have three opportunities to reach the NBA Finals for the second time in franchise history. They fell to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2000 in their only time playing for the title.
The No. 4 seed in the East looks ready for another chance. The Pacers are 11-3 in the postseason – unbeaten outside of losses in all three Game 3s – and they have won six straight road games, two shy of the NBA record within one postseason.
They simply ran by the Knicks in Game 4, scoring 22 fast-break points, but Haliburton expects much more resistance when they try to win a series on New York’s home floor for the second straight year.
“You can feel good about it for the night, but then you’ve got to be ready to go for Game 5 because their backs are against the wall,” Haliburton said. “They’re going to play as desperate as they can, as they should. They’re going to come out and throw a punch and throw more punches and more punches, and we’ve just got to be able to respond to those.”
The Knicks rallied from a 20-point deficit in Game 3, the third time in this postseason they have done that. Now they need to make a much different kind of comeback: the 14th in NBA history from a 3-1 deficit.
“I mean, we’ve been a team that has kind of found a way to do the impossible when it always seemed impossible. We just keep fighting, so it’s going to be a testament to our whole playoff run,” center Karl-Anthony Towns said. “Now we have to be in one of the biggest fights our lives and of our season, and it starts with next game.”
The Knicks are unsure if Towns can play in it. They are listing him as questionable because of a bruised left knee the All-Star sustained in a collision that left him hobbling late in Game 4, though he was able to finish the game.
Coach Tom Thibodeau has tried a lineup change, inserting Mitchell Robinson to play alongside Towns in a double-big look. He has gone deeper into his bench than usual in search of the right combinations to slow down a Pacers team that has reached 130 points twice in this series after doing so in Game 7 of the East semifinals last year, when they shot an NBA playoff-record 67.1% from the field in a rout at MSG.
The Knicks put themselves in bad positions by committing 17 turnovers in Game 4 that led to 20 points, but they also gave up easy baskets even when their defense was set. It left them with plenty to correct if they wanted to extend their first conference finals appearance since 2000 to a Game 6 in Indiana on Saturday.
“I’ve never known this team to quit,” forward Josh Hart said. “That’s not the character of the guys that we have in the locker room. So obviously our backs are against the wall, but we’re competitors and we’re going to bring it until the series is over.”
Nuggets’ Adelman wants team in tip-top condition
Denver – Jamal Murray was located in the back of the room and so he heard the message first-hand from new Denver Nuggets coach David Adelman. Same with Julian Strawther, who took a seat in the front row.
For the players not in attendance at Adelman’s introductory news conference Wednesday, a quick recap: Adelman wants everyone in even better condition and open to new ideas come training camp.
Because the Western Conference won’t be getting any easier, Adelman insisted. It’s up to the Nuggets to adjust behind a roster that revolves around three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic. Adelman wants his players to have a big voice, too, just like they did after he took over following the firing of coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth with three games left in the regular season.
“New ideas are good ideas,” Adelman said. “I have to give them something to come back to that excites them.”
Adelman earned the promotion from interim to full-time head coach after a postseason run that saw the Nuggets get to a Game 7 against Oklahoma City in the second round before being knocked out of the playoffs. This with a thin bench and an injury-hampered starting five.
Now, the work begins to put his own stamp on directing the Nuggets. He’s gathered a wealth of knowledge through an array of NBA coaching mentors such as his father Rick Adelman, Sam Mitchell, Frank Vogel, the late Flip Saunders and, of course, Malone.
“Very prepared,” Adelman said of his level of readiness. “When you’re around those people and you see how they run their business and their process, it’s kind of a cheat code.”
Fitness, Adelman maintained, will be a key to a fast start – and health come playoff time.
“Teams that get off to great starts usually at the end of the year have the best chance of being healthy in these big games,” explained Adelman, who’s working on rounding out his coaching staff. “But, yeah, that will be the expectation to come back in much better shape.”
One of the areas the Nuggets aim to address in the offseason is depth. The Nuggets ran out of steam in the Thunder series after beating the Los Angeles Clippers in seven games to advance out of the first round.
“Can they achieve that (championship goal) as currently constructed? I think the answer, as (Jokic) said after the playoffs, and it was obviously no,” Kroenke Sports & Entertainment vice chairman Josh Kroenke said. “So we need to take a hard look at how we can raise our ceiling going forward, whether that’s internally or externally.
“If you look at the teams still playing … with a little bit of help, maybe a little bit of luck, maybe it could be us. But it’s not. We’re very conscious of that and how we need to go about improving.”
Kroenke shocked the league last month when he fired Malone, the winningest coach in franchise history, and Booth after they helped bring home the franchise’s first NBA title in 2023. It was Kroenke’s way to rejuvenate the team’s energy heading into the postseason.
Next up for Kroenke, hiring a new GM. For now, Ben Tenzer is overseeing the role on an interim basis.
The plan, Kroenke said, is to bring bring Adelman into the GM process at some point.
“The input will be relatively minimal,” Kroenke said, “because what I’ll be looking for is cohesion between those two.”
Added Adelman of the GM: “This business is about cohesion. It’s all about just moving forward and winning. That’s it. It’s not about finding your best friend.”
The Nuggets don’t have a pick in the upcoming NBA draft. It may prove challenging to add depth without breaking up the core of Jokic, Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr. and Christian Braun.
That’s where Denver’s youth factors in and improvement from the likes of Strawther, Peyton Watson, Jalen Pickett and DaRon Holmes II, a first-round selection last year who tore an Achilles tendon in NBA Summer League.
“We’re hungry to get better,” Strawther said. “It’s all fuel to the fire.”
As for the style of play, Adelman will add some wrinkles but defense will always be an important principle.
“We have to get back to being an execution-based team,” Adelman said. “If that takes away some of our pace numbers, or whatever the analytics want to say, I think that’s OK if it wins you a game in May, as opposed to playing a game in December.
“The majority of the time, if you want to win big, you’ve got to play slow. You’ve got to be efficient. You’ve got to be clean. So that will be things we’ll talk about throughout the summer, going to training camp.”
Big 12 drops to 18 conference games
Orlando, Fla. – Another college basketball season in the books means another offseason to reset, recruit and reassess the growing needs of the game.
Following a yearlong experiment with a 20-game conference schedule, the Big 12 announced its intention to return to 18 games for the upcoming season.
Vice President of Big 12 Men’s Basketball Brian Thornton said Wednesday there were multiple reasons for the change.
“The schedule got very compressed and when you’re planning in a league as challenging as ours, understandably our coaches wanted a little bit of an opportunity during the course of conference play to take a deep breath, and going to 18 games allows that,” Thornton told The Associated Press at the Big 12 spring meetings. “It allows us to have a built-in bye, and it’s something that we feel is important for the time being.”
The transition to 18 games accommodates the requests of college coaches after complaints during the season. But the reason behind the shift goes beyond rest time and injury prevention.
“We want to maximize bids, we want to maximize seeds,” Thornton said. “The nonconference schedule is a huge component of that. We’re moving from 20 conference games to 18 conference games, and so we spent considerable time talking about the importance of replacing those games with quality games that allows our conference to continue to thrive.”
The Atlantic Coast Conference made the same move in early May after earning just four NCAA Tournament bids, its lowest total since 2013.
The Big 12 had seven bids in the tournament, the third-most behind the Big Ten (8) and SEC (14). Houston coach Kelvin Sampson, whose Cougars reached the national championship game, took notice.
“One of the great things but also great challenges of coaching in the Big 12 is that you’ve got to keep up,” Sampson said. “It’s competitive, you know. The SEC got 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament this year, we only had seven.”
Both the ACC and Big 12 hope the increased strength of schedule and strategic nonconference games lead to higher seeding, increased bids and more national attention.
“What our conference does during the nonconference schedule is really what sets the stage for how strong our conference is going to be overall,” Thornton said. “The ball games that we schedule, the success that we have during that time, will set the stage for if we’re viewed as the No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 conference in the country as we go down the stretch and head into March Madness.”
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Conference Finals schedulesEastern ConferenceNew York vs. Indiana
(Pacers lead 3-1)
▶ Game 1: Indiana 138-135 (OT)
▶ Game 2: Indiana 114-109
▶ Game 3: New York 106-100
▶ Game 4: Indiana 130-121
▶ Game 5: Thursday, at New York, 8
▶ x-Game 6: Saturday, at Indiana, 8
▶ x-Game 7: Monday, at New York, 8
Western ConferenceOklahoma City vs. Minnesota
(Thunder win 4-1)
▶ Game 1: Oklahoma City 114-88
▶ Game 2: Oklahoma City 118-103
▶ Game 3: Minnesota 143-101
▶ Game 4: Oklahoma City 128-126
▶ Game 5: Oklahoma City 124-94
NBA Finals schedule
▶ Game 1: Thursday, June 5
▶ Game 2: Sunday, June 8
▶ Game 3: Wednesday, June 11
▶ Game 4: Friday, June 13
▶ x-Game 5: Monday, June 16
▶ x-Game 6: Thursday, June 19
▶ x-Game 7: Sunday, June 22
x-If necessary
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