A funny thing happened on the way to a Dallas Mavericks sweep of the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals.
And, yes, the Mavs were on the way Tuesday night with a 13-point lead in the fourth quarter.
After all, Dallas had won the first two games at home, the Heat’s Dwyane Wade was hampered with five fouls, his team was seemingly spent after it had watched its impressive first-half leads dissipate and it was trailing by nine points entering the final period after sustaining a hailstorm of Mavs’ jumpers.
“This is our season!” Heat coach Pat Riley demanded as his players, shoulders slumped, shuffled back onto the court for their destiny.
Afterward, he admitted, “It didn’t look good. It didn’t feel good.”
But it ended well, as the Heat took Game 3 98-96 and now can look forward to Game 4 in Miami on Thursday night.
Wade led all scorers with 42 points and also had 13 rebounds. Gary Payton hit the game-winner from 18 feet with 9.3 seconds left as the Heat came from further back than it ever had in the team’s playoff history.
“Down and out, we always feel we can come back,” Wade said. “We have done it plenty of times this season. They were giving me the chance to go out and do it. I was thinking, `I’m not going down like this!'”
That didn’t surprise Riley.
“Incredible, just the heart [Wade] has,” Riley said. “He just rises to the occasion. We kept it simple at the end and he kept making play after play.”
Wade had 15 points in the fourth to bring the Heat to the brink of redemption.
Udonis Haslem and James Posey converted free throws, the hustling Haslem after a steal from Jason Terry, to push the Heat all the way back from a 89-76 deficit to a 95-93 edge with 42.8 seconds left.
A key, and perhaps most surprising moment in that sequence, was Shaquille O’Neal, who made only 2 of 16 free throws in the first two games, making two with the Heat trailing by five with 2:49 left.
“Make ’em!” O’Neal said when asked what he was thinking at the free-throw line on a night he was 4 of 6 on free throws. “I went back to the way I used to shoot them when I was young and when I was a good player.”
Down 95-93, the Mavs’ Devin Harris drove for the tying basket. Miami countered with perhaps the most unlikely of shooters as Payton hit his first shot of the game after making just 1 of 8 in the first two games.
“It was just fortunate I made the shot,” Payton said. “We saved the win not to go down 3-0. We have a lot of work to do. Now we have one game to work with a chance to tie this series up and change the momentum and then go into Sunday with a chance to go up. Probably everyone in this stadium thought we lost this game. But we said we had a chance to get back in this game, just play defense. We made a couple of stops, and Pat tells us to be ready for anything and I was ready for the shot.”
The Mavs had a chance to tie the game, but Dirk Nowitzki, who led Dallas with 30 points, missed the second of two free throws to leave the Heat ahead 97-96 with 3.4 seconds left.
The Mavs then fouled Wade, who made one of two free throws.
Dallas had a last gasp with a second left. But a lob to the basket was disrupted, the crowd erupted as much in relief as glee as only minutes before the expectation was the end to a season.
“It’s a tough one for us to swallow,” Nowitzki said. “Now we have a series. They have two more home games. Now we’re in a dogfight for sure.”
It didn’t look like it was going to be that way, though the Heat came out predictably strong to start.
Miami was the aggressor, beating the Mavs to the boards, where the Heat ended with a dominating 49-34 edge. The Heat went ahead 29-21 in the first quarter, then slipped some as the Mavs pulled within 37-35 but edged out again to lead 52-43 at halftime.
“We played a lot harder than we did in Dallas,” Riley said.
But then the Mavs, whose shooting was awful in the first half at 35 percent, found the basket. They hit 12 of their first 15 shots to burst into the lead and went into the fourth quarter ahead 77-68. It looked over for the Heat when Terry’s back-to-back jumpers gave Dallas the 89-76 lead with just more than six minutes remaining.
But Wade, who had been dogged by Josh Howard and unable to shoot jump shots, opened the fourth quarter with a three-pointer from the left corner to show the Heat wasn’t ready to wilt.
“We never gave up,” said O’Neal, who came back with 16 points and 11 rebounds after his career playoff-worst five-point output in Game 2. “We kept playing.”
And they will have the chance for at least two more games.
NBA Finals
DALLAS LEADS MIAMI, 2-1
All games at 8 p.m. on WLS-Ch. 7
Game 3: MIAMI 98, Dallas 96
Game 4: Thursday at Miami
Game 5: Sunday at Miami-*
Game 6: June 20 at Dallas-*
Game 7: June 22 at Dallas-*
Game 1: Thursday, DALLAS 90-80
Game 2: Sunday, DALLAS 99-85
Home team in CAPS*–if necessary
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sasmith@tribune.com
