The Boston Celtics aren’t done yet as they kept their season alive with a blowout win over the New York Knicks on Wednesday night. After taking Game 4, the Knicks came into Game 5 with a 3-1 lead in the series. They were hoping to finish off the shorthanded Celtics in Boston, but they couldn’t get it done. The Celtics won the game 127-102, and New York had trouble keeping up defensively all night long.
In the first two games of this series, the Knicks were down by 20 points and came back to win both. They went down big in the third quarter of Game 5 as well, but there was no comeback this time around. New York had no answer for the scorching hot Celtics offense.
“I think it’s the commitment to sprint back and then communicate to make sure that we understand what’s going on,” Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau said after the game, according to a post from Knicks Videos. “and we can’t have any personal dilemmas of if you’re missing a shot or it’s not going well for you offensivel that you’re jogging back. You got to sprint back, you got to communicate, and we got to be matched up. If one guy’s slow, you’re going to give him an open shot. You can’t do that against this team.”
The Knicks played well during the first half as they led by as many as nine points in the second quarter. The game was pretty back-and-forth during the first, and the Celtics did end up coming back to tie the game up before halftime. It looked like this one was shaping up to be another exciting finish, but Boston took things up a notch to begin the second half.
It didn’t take long for the Celtics to open up a double-digit lead in the third quarter. They extended the lead to 13 with about seven minute remaining, and they never looked back.
With Jayson Tatum out, the Celtics need other guys to step up, and they did just that. Derrick White and Jaylen Brown both had huge games as White dropped 34 points and Brown finished with 26. It was a total team effort in Game 5, and now, the Celtics live to see another day.
Game 6 between the Knicks and Celtics will go down on Friday night from Madison Square Garden in New York. The game will get underway at 8:00 ET, and it will be airing on ESPN. The Knicks are currently favored by 2.5 points.
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The New York Knicks have provided the NBA viewing audience with a seemingly-never ending flood of headlines. They fired their old coach before bringing in a new one, solidified themselves as candidates for some of the more intriguing free agents out there and, most recently, locked in more of their core for the long haul. They've earned the honorable distinction as contenders, a position they've longed to hold entering a season. As much as they've done to add to their impressive finish in last season's run to the Eastern Conference Finals, one of their more subtle signings is already viewed as one of the most indicative of their successful summer. Guerschon Yabusele was named by Bleacher Report's Dan Favale as the team's hidden gem just a month after signing to his new team. He's one of the hired guns that New York brought in during free agency to bolster their once-thin bench, having proven himself in last season's return to the NBA. "Putting down 38 percent of his threes on more than five attempts per 36 minutes elevated Yabusele's profile more than anything," Favale wrote. "There's some question whether it's for real, but the outside improvement dates back to his time with Real Madrid. "His ancillary scoring layers are the real gems. He can effectively attack closeouts (62.7 percent shooting on drives), get in-between buckets after setting and slipping screens, leak out in transition (1.49 points per possession) and also has some dead-stop creation in his arsenal." Favale points out how Yabusele doesn't quite fit into the list's overall theme, which generally covers end-of-the-bench prospects waiting for their breakout opportunity. Yabusele is only entering his fourth NBA season, but that fails to account for the five-year hiatus the 29-year-old embarked on after his first two underwhelming seasons. Now that he's returned to the league, he's ready to contribute as a shooter and scorer from the front court, a good complement to their defensively-tilted forwards and a decent bet to frighten opposing defensive units alongside fellow sniper Karl-Anthony Towns. The Knicks' getting Yabusele for cheap also opened up a little money for the rest of their offseason, which they continue benefitting from over a month after inking the deal.
Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Jackson Chourio was tearing it up in July before he strained his hamstring legging out a triple. He was placed on the injured list, and it only got worse from there. Less than 24 hours later, manager Pat Murphy said Chourio would be out beyond the 10-day minimum and possibly at least a month. On Saturday, beat reporter Curt Hogg shed another tidbit of light on the slugger’s timetable. It’s not necessarily worse news, but Hogg’s update probably does not illuminate much. Fans already knew Chourio was going to be out a while after Friday’s report, so this latest info isn’t surprising. It isn’t all that encouraging, either. It certainly suggests no expedited return schedule. Not to make assumptions, but the emphasis on the location of the damage versus evaluating its severity seems to indicate the Brewers are just hoping Chourio avoided a worse-case scenario. In that case, caution would indeed be first in the order of operations. Only after ascertaining clarity would it make sense to seriously estimate a recovery timetable. That he won’t be ready to immediately resume baseball workouts further points to a slow, methodical recovery process. For however long he remains out, the lineup will miss him badly. Chourio’s 17 home runs rank second on the team behind Christian Yelich, as do his 67 RBI. His .786 OPS leads the offense among qualified hitters. In 90 at-bats in July, he hit .367/.408/.600. The Brewers are resilient everywhere, but without one of their few genuine power threats and hottest bats, plus an everyday outfielder, they are courting a potential offensive slump. The most fans can hope for from Chourio is that he returns fully healthy by the first week of September. Until then, Blake Perkins and trade pickup Brandon Lockridge should see plenty of playing time while Yelich takes more reps in the outfield after getting most of his at-bats this season as the designated hitter.
The Indiana Fever have found a way to keep winning with star Caitlin Clark on the sidelines with a groin injury, improving their record to 17-12 with a win Sunday over the Seattle Storm. While it remains unclear exactly when Clark could take the floor again, her expected return timeline could match up well with a critical stretch in the Fever's schedule. ESPN's Holly Rowe reported in late July that while Clark remained day-to-day, it would be realistic for her to return sometime around the third week in August. That could put the reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year back on the court for what could be the team's most important stretch of the season -- a back-to-back set with the league-leading Minnesota Lynx on August 22 and 24. The Fever are looking to climb up in the crowded playoff standings, and getting at least a split from the home-and-home series with the Lynx could be critical. Fever coach Stephanie White stressed after Sunday's win that the team was not going to rush Clark back onto the court. "I know she wants to be out here on the floor, we want her out here on the floor, but making sure that she's ready is the most important thing," White said. "I still don't know how far we are, we're gonna take it one step at a time, one day at a time, and go from there."
Over the past four years, Bubba Wallace was used to sitting on the bubble of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. So was his wife, Amanda, and she wasn't too happy to see her husband slipping as the 2025 regular season waned. An incident in Chicago with Alex Bowman left Wallace two points above the cut line with seven races left in the regular season — a far cry from where he was in early June when he had a 54-point advantage. "After Chicago, it was unfortunate how that played out," Wallace said in a news conference at Iowa Speedway on Saturday. "All of my doing. My wife was very upset with me. It was kind of an eye-opening deal. She basically said, 'get your sh-- together, [because] I don't want to see you in that spot that you've been in so many years. I said, okay, I'll go win Indy." Wallace's victory at Indianapolis puts him in unfamiliar territory this late in the regular season. His previous two career wins came during the playoffs in seasons where he was not a participant. Wallace had to point his way into the postseason in nail-biting fashion in 2023 and missed out heartbreakingly in 2024. This year, no such postseason stress will fall on the 31-year-old driver. It's safe to say that after living life on the playoff cut line for so many years, he'll enjoy being off the hook over the final four weeks of the regular season.
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