Late in Game 3 of the NBA finals on Wednesday night, the Dallas Mavericks were on the brink. They had mostly clawed back a 21-point deficit to get within three points of the Boston Celtics. Then Luka Dončić, the Mavs’ superstar scorer, fouled out – the first time he’d ever done so in a playoff game.
That left Kyrie Irving, the Deadpool to Dončić’s Wolverine, to carry the day. And when he went on to score Dallas’s next four points, including an 18ft jump shot that cut the Boston lead to one, it looked as if the Mavericks might actually make this a competitive series. But it was not to be. Boston are simply too good and too tough. The result, a 106-99 Celtics victory on Dallas’s home floor, puts the Mavericks in a 0-3 series hole, a margin from which no NBA team has ever come back. And it came just when Irving, who scored a game-high 35 points, had two quiet games to start the series.
