Magic Spells Trouble for Cavs

Overtime Victory Puts NBA's Top Team One Loss From Playoff Elimination: Magic 116, Cavaliers 114

ORLANDO, May 26 -- When LeBron James launched the ball from just inside half court with no time remaining in overtime, so many people who love great basketball and the stars who've played it thought the miracle heave had a chance to win the game, and surely everybody rooting for Orlando feared it would. After all, James had sent the game into overtime with a pair of free throws with a half-second remaining here in Game 4, and it appeared he might add to his legend by helping Cleveland win and crushing Orlando for the second time in this Eastern Conference championship series.

But James's desperation shot clanged off the rim no good and his three turnovers -- he committed eight in the game -- and what looked like fatigue in overtime undermined his 44 points, 12 rebounds and 7 assists. Meanwhile, the No. 2 star in this series, Orlando's Dwight Howard, scored 10 points in overtime and blocked a James jumper to lead the Magic to a 116-114 victory that gives Orlando a commanding 3-1 series lead.

Orlando has now won seven of its last eight games against Cleveland and has a chance to close out the NBA's top regular season team Thursday night when the series moves to Cleveland for Game 5. Only eight teams in history have come back to win a playoff series after trailing 3-1, and nothing that's happened in the four games so far suggest that the Cavaliers will be up to doing that.

James scored his 44 points in more than 49 minutes in Game 4. And Delonte West added 17 points and seven assists. But Mo Williams, who expressed certainty Cleveland would tie the series by winning Game 4, missed 10 of 15 shots. And Cleveland missed 16 of 22 three-point shots. Five Orlando players scored in double figures, including Howard, who scored 27 points and grabbed 14 rebounds.

Rafer Alston scored a playoff career-high 26 points and hit 6 of 12 shots and led Orlando's 17-for-38 three-point shooting assault.

In all, it was yet another conference final classic, a game that seem decided several times even though there were so many thrills remaining, both in regulation and overtime. Cleveland led by four at the end of the first quarter, by eight at halftime and by one at the end of the third quarter. But the Cavaliers wilted and Orlando kept firing three-pointers. Even so, when James hit a pair of foul shots then fired in a three-pointer, Cleveland still had a chance to win in the final three seconds of overtime.

"My uncle had triple-bypass surgery in Las Vegas, and I certainly hope he didn't watch that game," Orlando Coach Stan Van Gundy said afterward. Asked about James's performance, Van Gundy said, "The three he hit before that (the final heave) is out of this world. The stuff he's doing in this series is unreal."

Van Gundy refused to hear any suggestion that his team's 3-1 lead is insurmountable, even though Orlando eliminated Philadelphia and Boston on the road so far in the first two rounds of this postseason. "This thing is a long, long way from over," he said. "I'm not comfortable in the least."

The conventional wisdom is that a jump-shooting team can't beat a great defense, not in the playoffs. But Orlando continues to defy that convention and a century of basketball percentages. Six Orlando players made three-pointers, including reserve Mickael Pietrus, who hit 5 of 11 in addition to playing tough defense on James, who missed 16 of 29 shots. No amount of scrambling or positioning could distract Orlando's three-point shooters during critical stretches of the second half, even with 4.1 seconds left in regulation when Rashard Lewis caught an inbounds pass and fired it in to give Orlando a 100-98 lead that threatened to win the game, until James made a pair of free throws with five-tenths of a second left in regulation.

"Tonight," Alston said, "was a terrific night shooting the ball from the three-point line."

In the first quarter, James wasn't Cleveland's leading scorer; Williams, who some say "guaranteed" a Cleveland victory, had eight points to James's seven and the Cavaliers jumped to a 25-21 lead in a first quarter dominated by smothering defense and missed open shots.

And by then a somewhat familiar pattern had already developed. The Magic would use a burst of offense to begin to open up a lead of seven or eight points, then let Cleveland back in the game with turnovers and/or bad shots.

The Cavaliers turned a 43-35 deficit into a 47-43 lead, then used a three-point play from James on an acrobatic move to the basket and a three-point shot by Gibson to push their lead to 53-46 with a minute to play in the first half.

Cleveland held a seven-point lead, 78-71, late in the third quarter but the Orlando three-point shooting not only erased the deficit but it pushed the Magic ahead in the first quarter. Hedo Turkoglu, Mickael Pietrus and especially Alston fired away from behind the arc as if they were playing in somebody's backyard. At one point, Orlando had connected on 15 of the team's 30 three-point shots. Lewis's very first three-pointer put the Magic ahead by six, 96-90, with four minutes to play, by which time it was clear that Orlando wasn't going to cool off on its own and there was nothing, again, that Cleveland could do to ice them.