Magic, Howard Are Tough Enough

Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the "lig." Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

Amid a fantastic slate top to bottom, Boston at Orlando stood out as the must-watch. And the teams delivered: the Magic ended up with a rollicking two-point victory on the back of Dwight Howard's deft post play and some lovely outside shooting from everyone else. (Which is to say they won this game how they win every other game.)

Howard mopped up with 24 points, 21 rebounds, four blocks and just two turnovers. He and Kendrick Perkins battled endlessly in the paint, but Howard came away with the advantage. Outside the arc, Rashard Lewis, Hedo Turkoglu and Courtney Lee combined to shoot 9-of-18 from three.

Paul Pierce and Ray Allen played well, but Kevin Garnett is still limited -- he played only 16 minutes in this one. In that sense, it'll be a different game should the teams meet against in May. (Getting Leon Powe healthy is key, too.) But you can't deny Orlando has some confidence building now.

Rewind: I'm not sure who on victorious Dallas was assigned to cover Anthony Morrow, but whatever they did really didn't work. Morrow had 29 points on ... 11 FGAs and seven FTAs. That, my friends, is ridiculously hot shooting. (The rare "better than 100% True Shooting percentage effort" -- which is to say it's better than if Morrow took 11 two-pointers and hit them all. Got love the three-ball!)

Revenge of Z-Bo: Even Wednesday's cruddy games had big cosmic ramifications! Zach Randolph had 33 points in his return to NYC. Mike Taylor (The Mike Taylor) scored 35 off the bench. Baron Davis hit more than half of his three-point attempts. The only shot David Lee missed was a single FT, scoring 17 on seven perfect FGAs. Al Harrington went ballistic with 38 points. The final score was 140-135. It doesn't matter who won.