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The opener of the W.N.B.A. semifinal playoff series between the Seattle Storm and the Minnesota Lynx was postponed nearly 90 minutes before its scheduled tipoff Sunday because of inconclusive coronavirus test results for Storm players.“Players with inconclusive results have undergone additional testing today and are currently in isolation,” the league said in a statement, adding that the postponement was “out of an abundance of caution.”The Lynx already had arrived at the arena and some of the players had been warming up when they were told the game was postponed.The league didn’t immediately announce when Game 1 of the best-of-five series would be played. It was to be the second of two playoff games on Sunday; the top-seeded Las Vegas Aces lost to the Connecticut Sun, the No. 7 seed, in the first game, 87-62.The second games in both series were scheduled for Tuesday night.The W.N.B.A. made it through a shortened 22-game regular season with a few false positive tests for the coronavirus, but no players had tested positive once the season started. The season is being played inside a bubble environment at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla.Everyone inside the bubble has been tested for the virus every day.The Storm, the No. 2 seed, are led by Breanna Stewart and Sue Bird. They tied with the Aces for the league’s best record at 18-4 but lost the tiebreaker for the top overall seed in the playoffs. Seattle is up against the No. 4 seed, the Minnesota Lynx, who have this season’s award winners for rookie of the year, Crystal Dangerfield, and coach of the year, Cheryl Reeve. More

Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks star, won his second straight Most Valuable Player Award, after another stellar regular season, the N.B.A. announced Friday. He became the first repeat winner of the N.B.A.’s top individual honor since the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry in 2015 and 2016. At 25 years old, Antetokounmpo is the first back-to-back winner at that age since LeBron James in 2009 and 2010.Antetokounmpo bested his numbers from last year, averaging career highs in points (29.5) and rebounds (13.6) in fewer minutes, while leading the Bucks to the league’s best regular-season record. He also won the N.B.A.’s Defensive Player of The Year Award.Antetokounmpo’s coronation as the most valuable player comes at an awkward time: The Bucks lost their second-round series with the Miami Heat in five games after being favored to go to the finals. They instead fell short of last year’s conference finals appearance, with Antetokounmpo relegated to the bench in the final game after sustaining an ankle injury in Game 4. It is reminiscent of 2007, when Dirk Nowitzki won the honor weeks after the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks were knocked out of the playoffs by the eighth-seeded Golden State Warriors.“Obviously, I would love to be still in the bubble, keep playing games, be in the Eastern Conference finals, you know, fighting to get an opportunity to play in the finals,” Antetokounmpo said in an interview on NBA TV from Athens, adding that he was “grateful” for the award.“But I’ve got to keep getting better,” he said. “I want to be a champion.”Next season, Antetokounmpo will attempt to become the first N.B.A. player to win three straight M.V.P.s since Larry Bird from 1984 to 1986. In March, Antetokounmpo told reporters that winning the award again is “not important at all” to him.Antetokounmpo received 85 of 101 first-place votes, while LeBron James, going for his fifth M.V.P. award, came second with 16 first-place votes. (The New York Times does not participate in awards voting.)Antetokounmpo is affectionately known as the Greek Freak, a reference to his unusually long wingspan and his home country of Greece, where he grew up. The son of Nigerian immigrants, Antetokounmpo was drafted by Milwaukee with the 15th pick in the draft in 2013. He was only 18. Antetokounmpo entered the league as a slender, raw talent with lots of potential, but it did not take long before he turned himself into a force. His first All-Star game came in 2017, the same year he won the Most Improved Player Award. But his rise continued from there, culminating with his first M.V.P. award last season.With the second award, Antetokounmpo joins Curry, James, Steve Nash, Tim Duncan, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Bird, Moses Malone, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell as the players who have repeated in back-to-back years.Now, after the Bucks’ loss to the Heat, Antetokounmpo has a big decision to make soon: He is eligible to become a free agent after next season.“As long as everybody’s on the same page and as long as everybody’s fighting for the same thing, fighting for the same thing every single day, which is to be a champion, I don’t see why not to be in Milwaukee for the next 15 years,” Antetokounmpo said Friday. More

Las Vegas Aces star A’ja Wilson won the W.N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award, the league announced Thursday.Wilson, the No. 1 overall pick three years ago, led the Aces to an 18-4 record during the shortened season and the top seed in the W.N.B.A. playoffs. Wilson averaged 20.5 points, 8.5 rebounds and 2 blocks this year for the Aces. She received 43 of the 47 first-place votes, easily outpacing Breanna Stewart of the Seattle Storm, who finished second, and Candace Parker of the Los Angeles Sparks, who was third.Wilson was surprised with the award on Thursday by W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert. The Aces player thought she was going to a meeting with league referees when Engelbert surprised her.Wilson, 24, is the first player from the franchise to win the award going back to when the team was in San Antonio and before that Utah.The league also announced that Minnesota’s Crystal Dangerfield was the league’s rookie of the year and her coach, Cheryl Reeve, earned coach of the year honors. Dangerfield, who averaged 16.2 points and 3.6 assists this season, became the second consecutive Lynx player to win the award, joining Napheesa Collier.Dangerfield, a second-round draft pick, also became the lowest-drafted player to ever win the award. Before Thursday, the lowest draft pick ever to win the league’s top rookie honor was Tracy Reid, who was drafted seventh in 1998. This year’s early favorites for the award — Sabrina Ionescu of the Liberty and Chennedy Carter of the Atlanta Dream — each missed games with injuries.Dangerfield particularly excelled in the fourth quarter, scoring the second-most total points in the league in the final period (6.5), behind only Arike Ogunbwale of the Dallas Wings.Dangerfield received 44 votes. Carter finished second with two votes and Dallas Wings forward Satou Sabally was third with one vote.Reeve helped the Lynx to the No. 4 seed in the playoffs despite missing their star center Sylvia Fowles to a calf injury for more than half of the season. It’s the third time that Reeve has won the award, as she also earned it in 2011 and 2016. She’s now tied with Van Chancellor and Mike Thibault for the most wins.Reeve received 25 votes from a national panel of 47 sportswriters and broadcasters. Bill Laimbeer of the Las Vegas Aces finished second with 17 votes, Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Sparks and Thibault of the Washington Mystics tied for third with two votes each. More

A journey for justice turned into a love story when Maya Moore, one of the W.N.B.A.’s brightest stars, married the man she helped free from prison.The man, Jonathan Irons, walked out of a Missouri prison on July 1 — more than 20 years after he was convicted on charges of burglary and assault. Mr. Irons, who pleaded not guilty, has insisted that he was not at the scene of the crime and had been misidentified.Ms. Moore’s family met Mr. Irons through prison ministry in 2007. She visited shortly before her freshman year at the University of Connecticut, where she became one of the most heralded women’s basketball players in collegiate history.“We wanted to announce today that we are super excited to continue the work that we’ve been doing together, but doing it as a married couple,” Ms. Moore, seated beside Mr. Irons, said on Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”The couple said they planned to continue to educate people about voting and to help others who had been wrongfully convicted. “We’re doing our part,” Mr. Irons said.Ms. Moore added that sometime in the spring she would have a “next step moving forward” concerning her basketball career, which she put on hold last year to answer what she said was a call from God.When Mr. Irons first met Ms. Moore in prison, he was skeptical. He said he thought that Ms. Moore, 18 at the time, was at the prison for a token visit. But she wanted to hear his story.She told him, “I’m here because I care,” she recalled in an interview last year with The New York Times.In an interview last year, Mr. Irons called Ms. Moore a lifesaver who gave him hope. “She is light,” he said. “Pure light.”During college, Ms. Moore said, she began to consider Mr. Irons as she would a sibling. It was challenging to go to Missouri for visits, but they kept in touch. She sent him books by her favorite spiritual writers, and sometimes before her big games, they spoke on the phone.It wasn’t until 2016 that Ms. Moore spoke publicly about the friendship between her and Mr. Irons, when she began championing changes in law enforcement and the legal system after a series of police shootings of unarmed Black men.She became a strong voice for prosecutorial changes. She stunned the sports world when she announced in February 2019 that she would step away from her career in women’s basketball, in part so she could help Mr. Irons in what they thought would be his final appeal.In March, Mr. Irons’s conviction was overturned by a state judge in Jefferson City, Mo. Mr. Irons was 16 when the crime for which he was convicted occurred. He was prosecuted for burglarizing a home in a St. Louis suburb and assaulting the homeowner with a gun.But there were no corroborating witnesses, fingerprints, DNA or blood evidence connecting Mr. Irons to the crime.Prosecutors claimed that Mr. Irons admitted to breaking into the victim’s home, but Mr. Irons and his lawyers denied that. The officer who interrogated Mr. Irons did so alone and failed to record the conversation. Mr. Irons, who is African-American, was tried as an adult and found guilty by an all-white jury.The judge’s decision hinged on fingerprint evidence that had not been divulged by prosecutors in Mr. Irons’s initial trial. Kent Gipson, Mr. Irons’s lawyer, argued that the state withheld that evidence, which could have shown someone else was responsible for the crime.Mr. Irons was released from prison in July, nearly four months after his conviction was overturned. Ms. Moore sunk to her knees when he walked out. Soon after, they married.A few years ago, when Ms. Moore came to visit Mr. Irons in prison, they both admitted they had strong feelings for each other. He said he wanted to marry her, but he said he also felt a need to protect her “because being in a relationship with a man in prison is extremely difficult and painful.”In their hotel room after his release, Mr. Irons said, he knelt down and asked Ms. Moore to marry him.She said yes.“Over time, it was pretty clear what the Lord was doing in our hearts,” Ms. Moore said, “and now we’re sitting here today, starting a whole new chapter together.” More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Even before his team lost its lead to the Denver Nuggets on Sunday afternoon, Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers turned to Tyronn Lue, one of his assistants, and told him that he sensed trouble. His players had slowed their pace on offense. It was obvious. But once that pace was gone, it was gone for good.“Listen, when you decide to be a coach, it’s not going to be roses every day,” Rivers said. “So we clearly have the right formula as far as how we’re playing, and then we keep losing it.”Expectations are different for the Clippers this season. Far removed from their laughingstock years, they have championship aspirations. They might even be favorites — or at least they were. But for a franchise that has never advanced to a conference finals, the Clippers are finding it increasingly difficult to separate themselves from their past.Presented with two opportunities to close out the Nuggets in the conference semifinals, the Clippers have now blown both. On Friday, they wasted a 16-point lead in a Game 5 loss. On Sunday, they disintegrated again as the Nuggets erased a 19-point deficit in a 111-98 win, evening the best-of-seven series at three games apiece. Game 7 is Tuesday night.Taken as a whole, it has been a cringeworthy stretch of basketball for the Clippers, worsened by the fact that the Lakers — who share the Staples Center arena with them in Los Angeles — are awaiting the winner in the conference finals. The Lakers will be well rested by Game 1 on Friday night. The Clippers just hope to still be playing by then.“If you get through this, it will definitely serve you well,” Rivers said. “There’s no doubt about that. Because when you go through things like this and adversity and you come out of it the other end, on the right end of it, it absolutely makes you a better team.”This is not the same Clippers team that, in 2015, blew a 3-1 series lead to the Houston Rockets in the conference semifinals, losing in seven games. Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, the leaders of that group, are long gone. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, who were brought in at no small cost last off-season to push a playoff-ready team over the top, have nothing to do with any of the franchise’s unfortunate history, of course. But perhaps the psychic wounds linger, and the reminders of past flameouts have been amplified in recent days.“It’s pressure every game,” Leonard said. “Obviously, nobody wants to go home. But just got to go out there, play your game and live with the results.”The Nuggets are a problem. They seem entirely unfazed by dire circumstances. In the first round, they trailed the Utah Jazz, 3-1, in their best-of-seven series before coming all the way back behind the tag-team brilliance of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray. Now, against the Clippers, the Nuggets are trying to do it again.No player in the series has been more fearsome than Jokic, who has averaged 25.8 points and 12 rebounds while shooting 53 percent from the field. On Sunday, the Nuggets outscored the Clippers by 62-30 over the game’s final 22 minutes. Jokic finished with 34 points.“Give them credit,” Rivers said of the Nuggets. “They’re playing hard. We’re playing the third-best team in the West, and they’re good, they’re relentless, resilient. But what we’ve done to get the leads has worked continuously, and then we stop doing it.”Specifically, he said, the Clippers stopped moving the ball. And as their lead washed away in the fourth quarter, Rivers searched for solutions. He even summoned Reggie Jackson, a reserve who had played sparingly in the series, off the bench. “We needed someone to make a shot,” Rivers said. (Jackson did not attempt one in 59 seconds of playing time.)In the Clippers’ 50 years of existence, they have made 15 trips to the playoffs and eight appearances in the conference semifinals, dating to their days as the Buffalo Braves. But that is as far as they have ever gone.The Clippers still hope that they can push through that barrier with one more win, but they have endured their share of obstacles. They have seldom seemed whole since the start of the season — so many months ago. George, for example, missed the team’s first 11 games after off-season shoulder surgery, then Leonard was sidelined with a knee contusion after George finally joined the starting lineup.The season restart inside the bubble at Walt Disney World has presented its own challenges. George has spoken about his struggles acclimating to life in the bubble. Montrezl Harrell, the league’s Sixth Man of the Year Award winner, was gone for a month as he grieved the death of his grandmother, and he has labored to find his form in the playoffs. Patrick Beverley, who fouled out in less than 18 minutes on Sunday, has been slowed by a calf injury. And Lou Williams has been wildly inconsistent, shooting 23.4 percent from 3-point range through the first two rounds.For much of the season, the Clippers expressed confidence — through all the injuries and absences, through all the growing pains and ups and downs — that they would be able to assemble the pieces when it mattered most. But abundant talent does not always translate into cohesive play, and the dress rehearsals are over.“They know they have an opportunity,” Rivers said. “They want to win worse than everybody.” More

The last time Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart were in a Game 7, they were up-and-coming youngsters on a 2018 Boston Celtics team that was full of potential going up against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Tatum even famously dunked on James in the fourth quarter of a losing effort — a small taste of his growth to come.On Friday night against the Toronto Raptors, Tatum, Brown and Smart solidified that they are no longer up-and-coming. The trio combined for 66 points as the Boston Celtics eliminated the reigning champion Raptors, 92-87, to return to the conference finals for the third time in four years.In a neck-and-neck series, all three players made crucial plays down the stretch. Brown had a momentum-shifting dunk. Tatum saved the game with an offensive rebound in the final minute. And Smart’s chase-down block — also in the final minute — surely will be in Celtics highlight reels for years to come.“I’m first team all-defense for a reason,” Smart said after the game.Is it possible to be young in age and old in experience? Tatum is 22. Brown is 23. Smart is 26. But they have now played seven playoff series together, not including the playoff games Smart and Brown had before Tatum entered the league. Sunday was the third Game 7 for the trio and the fourth for Brown and Smart.“We have three 30-year-olds,” Coach Brad Stevens said, referring to Kemba Walker, Brad Wanamaker and Gordon Hayward. “We’re like basically a college team with a couple of guys.”The young core looked poised down the stretch. They made just enough shots, grabbed just enough rebounds and stretched their arms just high enough to keep the Raptors from scoring when they needed to. For Toronto, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam looked out of sorts — especially when Lowry threw the ball into the backcourt for a turnover with about five minutes left. Siakam, who played poorly most of the series, finished with 13 points on 12 shots, while Lowry scored 16 points on 15 shots.Even so, it took every bit of the Celtics talent to hold off the resilient Raptors. This was not a team keen on giving up its crown easily.With 0.5 seconds left in Game 3 and Toronto down 2 points, the Raptors hit a 3-pointer to get back into the series. In Game 6, the Celtics led late in the fourth quarter, overtime and double overtime, yet Toronto still won. And in Game 7, even when the Celtics were up 10 points with less than five minutes left, the Raptors came back to within 2 in the final minute. It wasn’t even that surprising. That’s the kind of team Toronto was: You just assume they will come back.“Both teams were really tired,” Stevens said. “Both teams laid it all out there. This has been a grueling series.”And therein lies the cruelty of professional basketball: You live by the bounce and die by the bounce. Last year in a conference semifinal Game 7, the Raptors won by virtue of a fortuitous shot that rimmed in at the last second, beating the Philadelphia 76ers and effectively pushing the Sixers to drastically change their team. On Sunday, when the Raptors needed one more bounce, the plays went the other way.“We had more to give,” Lowry told reporters. “But, you know, unfortunately, we’re not getting any more now.”Toronto’s win last year followed by Friday’s elimination laid bare how rare championship runs are — and why it is imperative for the Celtics to take advantage of this opportunity. The league’s dynamics can shift on a dime, a result of player empowerment in free agency and unexpected trade requests.If you are a glass-half-full type, then you are probably feeling bullish about the Celtics’ chances against the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals, which begin on Tuesday. After all, the Raptors were significantly better than Miami during the regular season. And Hayward is expected to return against Miami.“We should definitely be hardened,” Stevens said. “We should definitely have a lot more in our toolbox to go back to, but we also have to get ready for a different, more unique team in Miami.”And Walker — barring an injury — is a better player than he showed against Toronto, against whom he averaged 17 points and six assists on 42 percent shooting.“These guys saved me all night,” Walker said, referring to his teammates.But Boston fans are never the glass-half-full types (rather, they often ask, is there anything in the glass?). In that respect, the Celtics are still a work in progress.For the first time since the late-2000s era of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, the Celtics will be favored in the Eastern Conference finals.Boston finished ahead of Miami in the regular season, beat opponents by more points and had a better offense and defense. Boston won two of the three games they played against one another, and probably has the best player on the floor in Tatum.The Celtics have been here before. But now fans expect them to win, unlike in 2018, when Kyrie Irving and Hayward were injured, and James was the opponent. Or in 2017, when the Celtics made an unexpected run to the conference finals and lost Isaiah Thomas to injuries and to James once again in the series. Brown and Smart were on that 2017 team.If the Celtics do not reach the finals, there might not be another opportunity as more teams drastically retool and the league shifts again.That they put themselves in position to be the favored team in the conference finals was an unexpected 2020 twist to begin with — the Celtics were not expected to be here before the season started. Remember that last year — and yes, we realize last year feels like decades ago — Boston was unceremoniously dumped from the postseason in the second round by the Milwaukee Bucks. Then Irving, Al Horford and other key rotation players left the team.The Celtics had to hit the reset button — just as Philadelphia did — with Walker as an Irving replacement, and a motley crew of various rookies. The Celtics quickly went from expected championship contenders to predicted mediocrity.One of those rookies, the 21-year-old forward Grant Williams, drafted near the end of the first round, played essential minutes at the end of Game 7 on Sunday — and made a number of key plays to seal the win.The youth movement has paid real dividends for the Celtics. The shoulders of Tatum, Brown and Smart collectively carried the franchise to one of the most momentous series wins for the Celtics in the last decade.Now this young core will find out if it has another veteran performance in store. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The N.B.A. announced Friday that Danuel House Jr., a reserve forward for the Houston Rockets, had breached the league’s health and safety protocols by inviting an unauthorized guest to his hotel room and that he would be leaving the Walt Disney World campus, where the league has made a major investment to finish out its season inside its so-called bubble.House did not play for the Rockets in Games 3 and 4 of their Western Conference semifinal series against the Los Angeles Lakers this week as the league conducted its investigation. The N.B.A. concluded that the guest, who was not identified by the league, had spent “multiple hours” in House’s hotel room at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa on Tuesday, in direct violation of league rules. The league has stringent policies about who can be on campus — or even interact with the players — as it seeks to insulate itself from the coronavirus pandemic.The league said in a statement that “no evidence was found that other players or staff had contact with the guest or were involved in this incident” and that House “will not participate with the Rockets team in additional games this season.”The Rockets trail the Lakers, 3-1, in their best-of-seven series, with Game 5 scheduled for Saturday night.The unauthorized guest was a woman who had worked on campus several weeks ago as a temperature checker, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation but was not authorized to publicly discuss it. It was not clear how she had managed to gain access to the property, which has secure checkpoints around the perimeter. But House propped one of the hotel doors open for her, the person said.It also was not immediately clear whether House had been forced to leave the bubble by either the N.B.A. or the Rockets. A spokeswoman for the Rockets declined to comment. In a 113-page rule book issued before the season resumed in July, the league said that a violation of protocol would be punishable by “a warning, fine, suspension and/or removal from the campus.”House, 27, was an important role player for the Rockets coming off the bench. In his fourth N.B.A. season, he averaged a career-best 10.5 points a game. He went undrafted in 2016 after playing college basketball at Houston and Texas A&M, then bounced around the N.B.A. — including stops in the G League — before working his way into the Rockets’ rotation. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The Houston Rockets managed to make things interesting in the fourth quarter, which is one thing the Rockets do well: make things interesting. They reinvent offensive schemes and engineer big trades and offer nightly rebukes to conventional wisdom. Houston’s style may be polarizing, but it is not a boring franchise.Now, two months since the Rockets’ arrival at Walt Disney World for the N.B.A.’s restart, their playoff run is coming unglued. After spending about an hour-and-a-half scuffling through some of its worst basketball of the season, at precisely the worst moment with the most at stake, Houston staged a late rally on Thursday night before falling to the Los Angeles Lakers, 110-100, in Game 4 of their Western Conference semifinals series.If fans watching from home were left dumbfounded, so were some of the team’s central figures: How could the Rockets have come out so flat?“That’s a good question,” James Harden said.“I don’t have an explanation for you,” Russell Westbrook said.“Just a lack of spirit,” said Rockets Coach Mike D’Antoni, whose team trails in the best-of-seven series, 3-1.The loss came as the league continued to investigate an alleged violation of protocol in its so-called bubble by at least one of Houston’s players, Danuel House Jr., a reserve who has now missed Games 3 and 4 of the series. The team has cited “personal reasons” as the cause of House’s absence on its injury report.D’Antoni was asked before Thursday’s game whether he expected House to return at some point in the series. Game 5 is scheduled for Saturday night.“I don’t know,” he said. “The investigation is going on. When they come out with their ruling, then we’ll just go from there.”Afterward, D’Antoni said he was not going to use the situation as an excuse for his team’s poor effort. Which was admirable, but there is little doubt that it has been a distraction — and there is the small matter of House’s importance to the team. He scored 13 points off the bench in Game 2. The Rockets could use him moving forward.Then again, they could have used a lot things against the Lakers on Thursday. An extra player. Stilts to defend Anthony Davis. Perhaps a postponement.The Rockets trailed by as many as 23 points. They scored exactly 2 points on fast breaks. And while Frank Vogel, the Lakers’ coach, countered the Rockets’ small-ball approach by benching JaVale McGee, who typically starts at center, Los Angeles still outrebounded Houston by 52-26.“There should’ve been a sense of urgency on everybody’s part,” Westbrook said.Here were some scenes from a debacle:In the third quarter, the Lakers’ Alex Caruso fouled the Rockets’ Austin Rivers, who went to the free-throw line but not before yapping back and forth with Caruso’s teammate, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Rivers made both free throws, but the episode seemed like a lot of work. The Lakers proceeded to inbound the ball and break the Rockets’ full-court press in about 2.7 nanoseconds before Davis finished an alley-oop so ferociously that the ball nearly bounced off the court into outer space.LeBron James opened the fourth quarter for the Lakers by going end-to-end for a layup as the Rockets watched him glide on by as if he were riding a Schwinn.The Rockets’ P.J. Tucker, a 6-foot-5 forward who has the thankless task of matching up against Davis, found himself later in the fourth quarter defending the Lakers’ Rajon Rondo after a switch. Tucker lunged at him near the 3-point line, then Rondo dribbled past him and discovered to his delight — if not to his total surprise, given the events of the evening — that no one was within 10 feet of him. It had to be one of the most wide-open half-court layups of his career.No one, though, had a more challenging time than Harden, who picked up three early fouls and was double-teamed by defenders whenever he had the ball. Those double-teams came in all shapes and sizes: Caruso and Davis, Caldwell-Pope and James. It was a constant canvas of yellow jerseys for Harden, who scored 21 points (most of them from the free-throw line) while shooting just 2 of 11 from the field. He also had 10 assists as he tried to facilitate for his teammates.“They’re playing real well, running around like crazy,” D’Antoni said of the Lakers.The Rockets miraculously trimmed the Lakers’ lead to 5 before Caruso sealed the win by burying a 3-pointer with 35.2 seconds left. For Houston, that late spurt — the team was sparked by reserves like Rivers and Ben McLemore — offered some cause for optimism amid an otherwise bleak night in the bubble.D’Antoni also alluded to some recent history: The Denver Nuggets trailed the Utah Jazz, 3-1, in their first-round series before advancing with three straight wins.“We fought, which is good, and we know what we have to do,” Westbrook said of the fourth quarter. “It’s going to take a lot of effort. It’s going to take everyone being uncomfortable in their role and making sure we understand that we have to sacrifice some of the things we love to do. But we’ve got to scramble. That gives us the best chance to win games.”At this point, they do not have much of a choice. More