The New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers split the first two games of their first-round series at Madison Square Garden, sending the matchup to Indianapolis tied at one apiece after a 112-106 Pacers win Tuesday night that snapped New York’s home-court advantage and reopened a series most analysts had expected the third-seeded Knicks to control. The result was one of three Game 2 outcomes Monday and Tuesday that have already reshaped the contours of the NBA’s opening round, with three of the eight series now level at 1-1 heading into the weekend’s road slate.

Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton, who had been listed as questionable on the morning shootaround report after a tight left hamstring flared in Saturday’s Game 1 loss, finished with 31 points, 12 assists and four steals across 38 minutes, the most productive line of his postseason career. He scored 14 of those points in the fourth quarter, including a four-point play with 1:42 remaining that put Indiana ahead by five. Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle, asked afterward whether the team had managed his minutes more aggressively than planned, said only that “Tyrese earned every shift he was on the floor, and he asked for more shifts than we gave him.”

“We had to take this one,” Haliburton said in the visitors’ tunnel after the game. “Going down 0-2 in New York with two games at home wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but it would have been the wrong way to spend the next four days. We didn’t want to spend them that way.”

The other two series that tilted on Game 2 were the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 113-104 Monday-night loss to the Miami Heat, which evened a series Cleveland was widely expected to close in five games or fewer, and the Houston Rockets’ 121-117 overtime defeat at home against the Minnesota Timberwolves, who took a 2-0 lead heading back to Minneapolis behind a 38-point, 11-assist performance from guard Anthony Edwards. The Rockets, the West’s No. 4 seed, are now the only top-four seed in either conference facing a 0-2 deficit.

Boston, Oklahoma City, Orlando and Denver each took 2-0 leads in their respective series, holding form as top seeds in both conferences. The Golden State Warriors and Phoenix Suns, who closed the regular season trading the West’s No. 4 and No. 5 seeds, split their first two games in San Francisco; Phoenix’s 109-102 Monday win evened that series and produced a 36-point night from forward Devin Booker, his sixth 30-point playoff outing in two seasons.

The Lakers-Nuggets series, the weekend’s marquee draw, sits at 1-1 after Denver’s Game 1 win and the Lakers’ 118-110 Game 2 victory Tuesday night at Ball Arena. LeBron James, who confirmed in March that the 2026 postseason would be his last, posted 27 points, eight assists and seven rebounds, while center Anthony Davis added 24 points and 14 rebounds against Nikola Jokic, who finished with a 33-point, 16-rebound, 11-assist triple-double in the loss.

“That’s the version of our team we believed we had,” Lakers head coach JJ Redick said. “It does not mean we have it. It means we showed it for forty-eight minutes.”

Games 3 begin Thursday in five of the eight series, with the league finalizing broadcast windows for the weekend on Tuesday evening. The Knicks-Pacers series resumes Friday night at Gainbridge Fieldhouse; the Lakers-Nuggets series resumes Thursday in Los Angeles.

In Major League Baseball, attention shifted Tuesday night to Comerica Park, where the Detroit Tigers opened a three-game series against the New York Yankees that pairs the American League’s two best run differentials through the season’s opening three weeks. The Tigers, at 13-5, took the opener 5-3 behind seven innings from left-hander Tarik Skubal, who struck out 11 and walked one. Designated hitter Kerry Carpenter homered twice, both off Yankees right-hander Clarke Schmidt.

The Yankees, who had stabilized after a 5-9 start by winning seven of their previous nine, fell to 12-9. Manager Aaron Boone said after the game that third baseman Oswaldo Cabrera, who left Sunday’s game in Tampa with a tight right hamstring, had been a late scratch and would be reevaluated Wednesday morning. “We’re playing a good team, and we played a flat first six innings,” Boone said. “That’ll get you beat against most clubs and it’ll get you beat by a lot against this one.”

Elsewhere in the American League, the Baltimore Orioles’ surprise start continued, with the AL East leaders pushing their record to 14-5 after a Tuesday-night sweep of the Cleveland Guardians at Camden Yards. Rookie catcher Daniel Vega, called up two weeks ago, drove in the go-ahead run in the seventh inning Tuesday. In the National League, the San Diego Padres took two of three from the Los Angeles Dodgers in a four-game weekend series, with the finale rained out and rescheduled for May 26. The Dodgers, at 9-12, remain in fourth place in the NL West.

“It is no longer too early to take some of this seriously,” said Rebecca Tan, a baseball analyst at the Sports Business Group. “Baltimore at fourteen-and-five, Detroit at thirteen-and-five, Cincinnati at twelve-and-six — those records reflect roster strengths that scouts identified in February and that markets were slow to price in. The Dodgers, by contrast, have a bullpen problem that has now produced losses in three series rather than three games.”

Major League Baseball is scheduled to release its first official All-Star ballot of the season Friday. League officials said the rolling pace-of-play and replay-challenge figures, both of which had drawn attention through the opening fortnight, would be updated alongside the ballot release.

Commissioner’s office staff said Tuesday evening that the league expected to confirm the schedule for next month’s London Series — featuring the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals on June 20 and 21 — by the end of the week, pending final venue and travel arrangements that had been delayed during the Iran war and were now back on the original timetable.