LOS ANGELES: The Cleveland Cavaliers erased an 18-point deficit to beat the Portland Trail Blazers 133-129 in an NBA overtime thriller and boost their league-best record with a 10th straight victory Sunday, as Boston defeated Denver in a clash of the past two champions.

De’Andre Hunter, getting a starting nod as Cavs star Donovan Mitchell rested, scored 18 of his game-high 32 points in the fourth quarter and overtime as Cleveland poured it on late to grab their 50th win of the season against 10 defeats.

“Made open shots, tried to get to the rim and get fouled,” Hunter said of his late-game heroics, which saw him give Cleveland the lead for good with a three-pointer that put them up 131-129 with 30.8 seconds remaining in overtime.

Hunter, acquired from Atlanta at the trade deadline, then came up with a steal and grabbed a rebound when Portland’s Deni Avdija missed a three-pointer. Finally Hunter drilled a pair of free-throws to seal the win.

“He carried us in every way,” Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said. “No way we get this win without him.”

Avdija led Portland with 30 points and added 12 rebounds and 10 assists for his first career triple-double. Anfernee Simons scored 27 points for the Blazers, who led most of the first half in pursuit of a fifth straight win.

After Cleveland edged ahead 42-39 on Darius Garland’s jump shot, Portland closed the first half on a 15-0 scoring run that sent them into the locker room leading 54-42.

The Cavs pulled level at 101-101 with 5:43 left in the fourth quarter, and they traded the lead three more times before Simons made a pair of free-throws that tied it at 119-119 to send it to overtime.

In Boston, the Celtics let a big lead get away before holding off the Nuggets 110-103.

Jaylen Brown scored 22 points and handed out eight assists to lead the reigning champion Celtics, who led by as many as 20 points in the third quarter only for Denver to pull within three points in the waning minutes.

Jamal Murray scored 13 of his 26 points in the fourth quarter to key the comeback, his driving layup off a rebound of a Brown miss pulling the Nuggets within 102-99 with 1:15 remaining.

NBA Most valuable Player Nikola Jokic scored 20 points with 14 rebounds and nine assists for the 2023 champion Nuggets, but the Celtics came up with the shots when they needed them to snap a two-game skid.

The Los Angeles Lakers led all the way in a 108-102 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers, their sixth straight victory pushing them a hair ahead of the Nuggets for second place in the Western Conference.

Luka Doncic scored 29 points and Lakers superstar LeBron James, the league’s all-time leading scorer and the first to reach 40,000 regular-season points, scored 17 and is one point shy of becoming the first to score 50,000 points in the regular-season and playoffs combined.

Jalen Williams scored a career-high 41 points to fuel Western Conference leaders Oklahoma City in a 146-132 victory over the San Antonio Spurs.

Rookie Stephon Castle scored 32 points to lead the Spurs, who led at halftime but couldn’t keep pace after the break.

Williams said Oklahoma City’s defensive resolve was fortified by a third-quarter altercation between Thunder reserve Kenrich Williams and San Antonio’s Julian Champagnie that saw both players ejected along with the Thunder’s Luguentz Dort.

New York’s Jalen Brunson scored 31 points — including the go-ahead three-pointer with 2:27 left in overtime — to help the Knicks erase a 19-point deficit and beat the Heat 116-112 in Miami.

KARACHI : “Dram,” meaning a measure of whisky. “Turm,” describing a cavalry unit. “Taupie,” a foolish youngster.

Not words in a typical teen’s vocabulary, but all come easily to Pakistani prodigy Bilal Asher, world under-14 Scrabble champion.

Despite a musty reputation, the word-spelling game has a cult youth following in Pakistan, a legacy of the English language imposed by Britain’s empire but which the country has adapted into its own dialect since independence.

In the eccentric field of competitive Scrabble, Pakistan’s youngsters reign supreme — the current youth world champions and past victors more times than any other nation since the tournament debuted in 2006.

“It requires a lot of hard work and determination,” said 13-year-old Asher after vanquishing a grey-bearded opponent.

“You have to trust the process for a very long time, and then gradually it will show the results.”

Karachi, a megacity shrugging off its old definition as a den of violent crime, is Pakistan’s incubator for talent in Scrabble — where players spell words linked like a crossword with random lettered tiles.

Schools in the southern port metropolis organize tutorials with professional Scrabble coaches and grant scholarships to top players, while parents push their kids to become virtuosos.

“They inculcate you in this game,” says Asher, one of around 100 players thronging a hotel function room for a Pakistan Scrabble Association (PSA) event as most of the city dozed through a Sunday morning.

Daunters (meaning intimidating people), imarets (inns for pilgrims) and trienes (chemical compounds containing three double bonds) are spelled out by ranks of seated opponents.

Some are so young their feet don’t touch the ground, as they use chess clocks to time their turns.

“They’re so interested because the parents are interested,” said 16-year-old Affan Salman, who became the world youth Scrabble champion in Sri Lanka last year.

“They want their children to do productive things — Scrabble is a productive game.”

English was foisted on the Indian subcontinent by Britain’s colonialism and an 1835 order from London started to systematize it as the main language of education.

The plan’s architect, Thomas Macaulay, said the aim was to produce “a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

It was instrumental in creating a colonial civil service to rule for Britain according to Kaleem Raza Khan, who teaches English at Karachi’s Salim Habib University.

“They started teaching English because they wanted to create a class of people, Indian people, who would be in the middle of the people and the rulers,” said Khan, whose wife and daughter are Scrabble devotees.

British rule ended in the bloody partition of 1947 creating India and Pakistan.

Today there are upwards of 70 languages spoken in Pakistan, but English remains an official state language alongside the lingua franca Urdu, and they mingle in daily usage.

Schools often still teach English with verbose colonial-era textbooks.

“The adaptation of English as the main language is definitely a relation to the colonial era,” PSA youth program director Tariq Pervez. “That is our main link.”

The English of Pakistani officialdom remains steeped in anachronistic words.

The prime minister describes militant attacks as “dastardly,” state media dubs protesters “miscreants” and the military denounces its “nefarious” adversaries.

Becoming fluent in the loquacious lingo of Pakistani English remains aspirational because of its association to the upper echelons.

In Pakistan more than a third of children between the ages of five and 16 are out of school — a total of nearly 26 million, according to the 2023 census.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif declared an “education emergency” last year to address the stark figures.

“People are interested in Scrabble because they can get opportunities for scholarships in universities or for jobs because it provides the vocab,” said Asher’s sister Manaal.

But the 14-year-old reigning female number one in Pakistan warned: “You’ve got to be resilient otherwise Scrabble isn’t right for you.”

In the Karachi hotel, Scrabble — invented in the 1930s during America’s Great Depression by an unemployed architect — is an informal training program for success in later life.

“The main language of learning is English,” said Pervez.

“This game has a great pull,” he added. “The demand is so big. So many kids want to play, we don’t have enough resources to accommodate all of them.”
At the youngest level the vocabulary of the players is more rudimentary: toy, tiger, jar, oink.

But professional Scrabble coach Waseem Khatri earns 250,000 rupees ($880) a month — nearly seven times the minimum wage — coaching some 6,000 students across Karachi’s school system to up their game.

In Pakistani English parlance “they try to express things in a more beautiful way — in a long way to express their feelings,” said 36-year-old Khatri.

“We try to utilize those words also in Scrabble.”

But when Asher wins he is overwhelmed with joy, and those long words don’t come so easily.

“I cannot describe the feeling,” he says.