(Basketball news) The Phoenix Suns continued their rich vein in form as they routed past the Oklahoma City Thunder 132-101. For the Suns, Booker scored 44 points, Terrence Ross added 24 points as Kevin Durant was expected to make his home debut but it was over before it started after a pregame mishap while Chris Paul had 18 points and nine assists.

For the Thunder, Lindy Waters III led the scoring with 23 points as he made six 3-pointers and was just two points shy of his career high while Oklahoma City played without All-Star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander because of “abdominal strain injury management. With this result the Suns improved their record to 37-29 and stayed 4th in the Western Conference Standings.

“The city’s been waiting on this, it was a big day,” Booker said. “We’ll reschedule the party. The people that missed out on it tonight, I tried to give them a little something to make it better.”

“We’ll get more testing done tomorrow,” Suns coach Monty Williams said. “Right now, it’s just an ankle sprain and we don’t have anything official to report.”

“I know how much he loves to play and wanted to play,” Paul said. “But stuff happens.”

“Obviously, Booker was great tonight,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “Their offense was cooking and we didn’t do a good enough job offensively to keep pace with them.”

The Boston Celtics returned to winning ways as they defeated the Portland Trail Blazers 115-93. For the Celtics, Jayson Tatum scored 30 points and made six 3-pointers as this was 36th game this season with 30 or more points while Derrick White added 21 points and five assists, Al Horford finished with 17 points, six rebounds and five assists. For the Trail Blazers, Damian Lillard scored 27 points and had eight assists as their record dropped to 14-20 on the road. Jerami Grant added 13 points. whileJusuf Nurkic returned after a 14-game absence with a left calf strain as He’d been sidelined since Feb. 1, he started and had five points and six rebounds in 17 minutes.

“Just getting out of that losing streak is good for our group,” Horford said. “I guess you could say it’s a breath of fresh air.”

“I think that’s always the goal, no matter how many games are left.,” Mazzulla said. “The great teams stay the best version of themselves the longest. And when you don’t, you have to quickly get back to who you are.”

“I don’t think we played great at all,” Blazers coach Chauncey Billups said. “We weren’t committed to playing the right way the entire night. We’ve had a tendency to when things aren’t going well to just kind of throw it to Dame and watch him play. That doesn’t work against good teams.”

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