He’d been averaging 15 a night and shooting 36 percent. Then he walked into the building where his season ended last spring.
Cleveland’s season ended in this building last spring. The Knicks erased a 22-point fourth-quarter lead in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, won it in overtime, and swept the series from there. Wednesday night the Cavaliers came back to Madison Square Garden for the first time since, built a lead, watched the building start to believe it was happening again — and then closed the game the Knicks used to close. James Harden’s season-high 32 points carried Cleveland past New York, 115–107.
The Harden part is the shock. He walked in averaging 15.3 points on 36.4 percent shooting, carrying a miserable first month with him, four nights after these same Knicks had beaten Cleveland on the Cavaliers’ own floor. None of it showed. Harden hit 9 of 14 shots, 5 of 7 from three, and 9 of 11 at the line, and the desperate version of him that has been hunting for a rhythm since October never appeared. This was the other one — picking the game apart in the order he chose.
Thirteen in the second
The turn came early. Cleveland won the first quarter 33–23, and Harden owned the second: 13 points on a perfect 4-for-4, three of them triples, as the Cavaliers reached the half up 59–53. Donovan Mitchell ran everything else — 23 points, seven rebounds, six assists and a game-best plus-15 — and Cleveland’s bench kept the pressure where the starters left it, Tyrese Proctor scoring 15 and Meleek Thomas 14. A team that had lost two straight spent the first half playing like the one that used to live in this round of the playoffs.
New York kept erasing it
The second half kept threatening to turn into last spring. Cleveland would build something, New York would take most of it back, and the cycle repeated until it stopped feeling like a pattern and started feeling like a script. The Knicks had already trimmed a 10-point first-quarter hole to six by halftime and kept the game within two possessions through the third. Early in the fourth, Thomas’s three pushed the lead to 95–85 with 8:26 left. The Knicks answered with a 14–4 run, and when OG Anunoby’s free throws tied it at 101 with 5:09 to play, the Garden was loud in the specific way it gets when it can smell a comeback it has seen before.
New York’s stars did their part. Jalen Brunson scored 27 without attempting a single free throw — every point from the floor, on 12-of-23 shooting. Karl-Anthony Towns finished with 21 points, 11 rebounds and eight assists, his 11th straight double-double to open a season, tying the franchise record Willis Reed set more than half a century ago. Miles McBride added 19 off the bench with five threes. The Knicks had the better closing hand on paper. They just never got to play it.
This time, Cleveland finished
What the Cavaliers didn’t do this time was fold. Harden’s 27-foot three with 4:22 left snapped the tie for good. Evan Mobley scored inside. Jarrett Allen — 11 points and 14 rebounds on the night — scored at the rim twice in the last two minutes, the first a driving dunk off Mitchell’s feed with 1:41 left that made it 110–103 and took the noise out of the building, the second in the final half-minute. Harden closed it at the line: 115–107, Cleveland’s skid over, New York’s four-game winning streak with it.
Cleveland is 6–6, and it visits Miami on Friday. New York is 6–5 and goes to Indiana the same night, carrying a record-tying streak it would rather have kept winning with.
One night doesn’t fix a 6–6 team, and Harden won’t shoot like this every week. But Cleveland walked into the loudest building in the league, against the team that swept it out of the spring, and won the last five minutes. That’s the part that travels.
Game Center — Cleveland at New York · Stats Hub · NBA hub
