NEW ORLEANS — Carmelo Anthony and the Denver Nuggets looked like the only ones having fun in this party town.

Anthony scored all of his 26 points in the first three quarters, and Denver thoroughly dismantled the New Orleans Hornets, 121-63, last night to take a commanding 3-1 lead in their first-round playoff series.

The New Orleans Arena was mostly empty by the end of the third quarter, when Denver led 89-50 on its way to matching the most lopsided victory in NBA playoff history. The Minneapolis Lakers beat the St. Louis Hawks, 133-75, in 1956.

"I wouldn't have thought that we would win by 58 points," Anthony said. "I never thought anyone could win by 58 points in the playoffs."

The Nuggets stifled Hornets All-Star Chris Paul, whose four points and six assists amounted to one of the worst games of his career.

The Nuggets can close out the series at home in Game 5 tomorrow night. They will if they play as well as they did in Game 4, when they led by 20 early and by more than that most of the second half.

"Their defense was fantastic tonight," Hornets coach Byron Scott said. "It's the worst we've played since I've been here. That's the worst basketball game I've ever seen us play and it just came at the wrong time."

It was the first time Paul, who did not play in the fourth quarter, had ever scored fewer than 14 points in a playoff game.

"Every time we tried something, they countered," Paul said. "We didn't play well and they executed their game plan to perfection."

Denver held New Orleans to only 31.5 percent shooting and forced the Hornets into a franchise playoff-high 27 turnovers, which led to 41 Nuggets points.

HAWKS 81, HEAT 71:

Zaza Pachulia had 12 points and 18 rebounds, and Atlanta raced out to a huge first-half lead and frustrated Dwyane Wade endlessly in tying its first-round Eastern Conference playoff series against host Miami at two games apiece.

Mike Bibby scored 15 points, Joe Johnson added 14 and Josh Smith 13 for the Hawks.

Wade scored 22 points, doing so on 9-for-26 shooting and wincing at times from a back injury.

It was Atlanta's first road postseason win in nearly 12 years, a stretch spanning 13 games. Now the series returns to Atlanta tomorrow for Game 5, and all the Hawks need is to defend their home court twice to get a second-round shot against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

NOTES

Williams tasered: Former NBA star Jayson Williams was zapped with a stun gun by police in his swank New York hotel suite yesterday after the reportedly suicidal athlete resisted attempts by officers to take him to a hospital.

When officers arrived, the 6-foot-10, 325-pound Williams appeared drunk and agitated, police said. There were empty bottles of prescription drugs strewn around his disheveled hotel suite and several suicide notes.

Rodman sued: A federal judge in Las Vegas has ordered former NBA star Dennis Rodman to pay a former casino employee $225,000 for grabbing and humiliating her at work in March 2006.

Sara Ure, 28, is a former beverage manager at the Hard Rock Casino. She accused Rodman of grabbing her and forcing her to dance, holding her against her will and slapping her backside in front of subordinates and patrons.

Lakers: Luke Walton will miss at least one week of the NBA playoffs with a partial ligament tear in his left ankle.

The Los Angeles Lakers' forward sprained his ankle in Saturday night's Game 4 at Utah. He had an MRI yesterday morning, which revealed the partial tear of the deltoid ligament.

Bulls: Chicago Bulls guard Ben Gordon is listed as day-to-day after an MRI confirmed he has a strained left hamstring. Gordon was hurt in the second quarter Sunday in a victory over the Boston Celtics.