Spain oust Netherlands on penalties to reach Nations League semis

MIAMI: Despite a double bogey on his closing hole, Patrick Reed shot a 5-under par 67 and grabbed the first-round lead at LIV Golf Miami on Friday at Trump National Doral.

Reed began his round on the 10th hole and put seven birdies on his card, reaching 7 under with a tap-in at the par-5 eighth. But at the par-3 ninth, he missed the green wide left and compounded the mistake by putting his second shot into a bunker.

Reed came back to the pack a bit, but he still held a two-shot lead over Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson (3-under 69).

“I mean, the first 17 were great,” Reed said. “No, as a whole I played solid. I hit the ball pretty well off the tee, hit some quality iron shots and made some putts, and I think that’s what you have to do around this place.

.”.. Yeah, for the back tee with this kind of wind direction here on 9, I don’t know what to do. I don’t have a club for it that I feel like I can hit a straight shot, and it’s hard to start it over the water and get it turning back. It was just an unfortunate finish, but at the end of the day, it’s still a solid round of golf.”

In LIV Golf’s first US event of 2025, it was fitting that the top four players are all past major champions, three of them with at least one green jacket to their name with the Masters a week away.

Reed won the Masters in 2018, Mickelson has captured three green jackets and Dustin Johnson won the 2020 edition that was delayed to November.

“Obviously I was playing really good at the end of 2020,” Johnson said Friday. “But the game I feel like it’s getting pretty close to that. Obviously it’s a really fine line to being that good or just a little bit off, but yeah, I’ve got a lot of confidence in my game right now.”

Johnson had a three-birdie run at Nos. 14-16 late in his round to get to 3 under, while DeChambeau was steady with four birdies and just one bogey.

DeChambeau’s team, Crushers GC, also holds a narrow two-shot lead in the team competition through one round. The four-man team of DeChambeau, Charles Howell III, Englishman Paul Casey and India’s Anirban Lahiri combined to go 2 under par, with Johnson’s 4Aces GC sitting second at even par.

“There’s a reason we won here (at the LIV Team Championship) in 2023,” DeChambeau said. “They like this golf course. They like a tough, challenging golf course where you can strategically play and let everybody kind of mess up on their own, and we just plot along and make a couple birdies where we can and move along when it’s a really brutal hole.”

LOS ANGELES: Jalen Green and Alperen Sengun combined for 65 points as the Houston Rockets halted Oklahoma City’s 11-game winning streak on Friday with a statement 125-111 victory.

In a potential Western Conference finals preview, the Rockets produced a dominant all-round performance to jolt the top-seeded Thunder’s all-conquering preparations for the postseason.

Green finished with 34 points from 11-of-24 shooting while Turkish big man Sengun made 31 points as second-placed Houston improved to 51-27.

Oklahoma City grabbed the lead in the opening minutes of the first quarter, but Houston soon knocked the Thunder out of their stride with a physical approach to move into the lead before building a 23-point advantage late in the second quarter.

Houston maintained a 20-point cushion with 2min 53sec remaining in the third quarter before a Thunder rally cut the gap to single digits early in the fourth.

But Houston coolly regrouped and snuffed out any chance of a comeback from Oklahoma City.

Houston coach Ime Udoka praised the aggressive scoring approach of Sengun and teammate Green.

“He was in attack mode the whole time. Him and Jalen were a great combination tonight,” Udoka said of Sengun. “We’re hard to beat when those two are going like that.”

Jalen Williams led the OKC scoring with 33 points while Shai Gilgeous-Alexander added 22. Chet Holmgren chipped in with 20 points, 18 of them coming from his tally of six three-pointers.

The Boston Celtics claimed a piece of NBA history by setting a new record for the number of three-pointers scored in a single season.

The NBA champions eclipsed the Golden State Warriors’ record of 1,363 threes set in the 2022-2023 season after adding 14 threes to their season tally in a 123-103 victory over the Phoenix Suns.

Boston’s three-point barrage left them with 1,370 for the season.

Boston coach Joe Mazzulla said the three-point scoring record reflected his team’s work ethic and basketball IQ.

“It says that we fight for a good shot,” Mazzulla said.

“We were able to fight for good looks, versus the coverage. That’s the most important thing, continuing to understand how we’re being defended and how we can create the best shot possible.

“Credit to the guys for continuing to make the right reads.”

Jaylen Brown led Boston’s scoring with 31 points while Jayson Tatum finished with 23 in a win that dealt another blow to the Suns’ hopes of forcing their way into the postseason reckoning.

The Suns’ fifth straight defeat leaves them in 11th place in the Western Conference with a 35-42 record, two wins behind the 10th-placed Sacramento Kings (37-40), 125-102 winners over Charlotte on Friday.

The top six teams in each conference qualify automatically for the playoffs, while teams ranked seventh to 10th enter a four-team play-in tournament to determine the final two playoff places.

In San Antonio, the Cleveland Cavaliers edged closer to locking up the No.1 seed from the Eastern Conference with a nailbiting 114-113 defeat of the Spurs.