With the help of Raymond Felton's season-high 27 points, New York Knicks eased past defending NBA champions Miami Heat 112-92 Thursday night, without their prime player Carmelo Anthony.
"It was fun. It was fun the whole game," the Associated Press quoted Felton as saying. "Everybody contributed tonight. Everybody did something amazing. We played a great game minus our superstar."
Steve Novak added 18 points, J.R. Smith scored 13 and chipped in six rebounds and Tyson Chandler scored 13 and grabbed nine rebounds to help the Knicks win their fifth straight game.
New York made this game memorable by shooting eight three-pointers in the third quarter, the most by any team in one quarter in NBA history.
Carmelo Anthony was out because of a hand injury, and despite his absence the team played like championship contenders.
"You've got a key guy that goes down and the other guys get an opportunity to play and step up and make plays," Knicks coach Mike Woodson said. "I thought it was a total team effort from everybody across the board. I thought our defense was solid and then we kind of broke it open at the end."
For the Heat, who lost their second game in a row, top scorer LeBron James added 31 points and chipped in with 10 rebounds and nine assists.
"We'll stay connected," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. "We're going to own this. We're not going to brush this off. And we're going to fix it."
Rasheed Wallace also scored double figures with 12 points and chipped in seven rebounds while Jason Kidd had 11 points and four assists.
The Knicks shot 18 for 44 from three-point range, while the Heat only made six from 16. Similarly, the Knicks made 41 from 91 total shots, whereas the Heat had only 32 from 76.
At the end of the second quarter, the score was tied at 53. From the third quarter, however, the Knicks took control.
"We'll be fine. We'll be fine," James said. "But we can't act like what happened tonight or in Washington or some of the games that we even won that we probably shouldn't have won, we can't act like, 'OK, we made those things happen.' We haven't played like we're capable of playing."
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