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Diaw's 3-pointer lifts Bobcats over Warriors

Feb 28, 2009 - 7:50 AM OAKLAND, California (Ticker) -- Given another chance, Boris Diaw made up for an enormous gaffe.

Diaw drilled a 3-pointer with 2.9 seconds left to give the Charlotte Bobcats a 112-109 win over the Golden State Warriors on Friday. The shot came seconds after the forward purposely fouled Stephen Jackson in a tie game.

"Boris just lost track of the score," Bobcats coach Larry Brown said. "But he's smarter than most coaches on our bench, me included, so he just made a play, he just wanted to make it exciting."

Diaw made up for the lapse by drilling the shot to give the Bobcats a 110-109 edge.

Earlier, Jackson, who led Golden State with 33 points and added eight assists, put the Warriors on top, 107-106, with 28 seconds remaining on a fall-away jumper.

Emeka Okafor was fouled on the other end and missed the first foul shot before tying the score by making the second.

"We were saying 'Emeka's not a great free-throw shooter,'" Brown said. "And we were just saying if (Warriors center Andris) Biedrins got the rebound on the second one, we would foul. But he made the second one."

Diaw fouled Jackson off the inbounds pass and Golden State's captain made both free throws to give his team a 109-107 lead.

"It was going to be tough to come back from that," Diaw said. "We had to try to tie the game in the last seconds. I wasn't going to force anything but the ball was coming up to me. Of course I was trying to do something."

After Diaw's shot, the Warriors called time. Jackson threw away the inbounds pass and Raymond Felton made a pair of free throws to seal the victory.

"Bad pass by me, terrible pass," Jackson said. "I was assuming (Kelenna Azubuike) would pop out more to get the ball, but I led him too much and it was a bad pass. Bad pass by me."

"Well we seem to be a little snakebit this year on people making shots, important shots, at the buzzer or the game-winner," Warriors coach Don Nelson said. "The last two years we seem to win all those games, this year we're losing all those games, but that's the way it is and we have to live with it."

The win was the Bobcats' second straight on the road after dropping their previous seven contests away from home.

Charlotte (24-35) is three games behind Milwaukee (28-33) for the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

"That's all we're going for right now," Diaw said. "That's what we were playing for every night is trying to get closer to the eighth spot and try to get it by the end of the season."

The lowest-scoring team in the NBA looked like anything but in the first half as the Bobcats shot 61 percent (25-of-41) from the floor to carry a 61-55 advantage into the locker rooms.

"It obviously helped us because we weren't stopping them," Brown said of his team's 14-of-19 shooting in the second quarter. "We generally don't get into up-and-down games, we like to run off steals and blocks but control the tempo especially against a team like them. But we executed pretty well in the second quarter."

Golden State, which trails only the Western Conference-leading Lakers in points per game, averaging 108.1, found its stroke in the third quarter, narrowing the deficit to 89-86 heading into a back-and-fourth final session.