DALLAS — When thinking about teams trying to rally from 3-0 deficits to win playoff series, my mind always wanders first to the wisdom of Bobby Valentine, who was certainly full of it. In so many ways.
Not that Valentine ever accomplished the feat. It’s sort of like Pat Riley owning the trademark rights to the phrase “three-peat” which he uttered at a Lakers championship parade but never achieved. Anyway, I always go back to the 1999 playoffs when Valentine’s Mets trailed Atlanta 3-0 after three close, low-scoring games and how emphatic the one-time Rangers manager was that a baseball team was going to do this one day and it might as well be now.
That’s one thing Valentine could be. Loud and emphatic.
Then the Mets won Game 4.
Then the Mets won Game 5 in 15 innings.
Then the Mets trailed by five runs, but came back to push Game 6 into extra innings tied at 8.
Then Kenny Rogers walked in the winning run, Valentine slammed his arms on the dugout rails and we waited five more years for the Boston Red Sox to actually do the darned thing against the New York Yankees.
So it’s happened once in baseball in all those years of World Series and playoff games. It has happened four times in the NHL, as long ago as 1942 and as recently as 2014 when the Kings beat the Sharks. But never in the NBA. Why is basketball different?
I would say the logical answer is the best players win in basketball whereas pitching or a hot goaltender might turn a series upside down in the other sports. So what is left for the Mavericks beyond getting one more try — their sixth actually — to win a playoff game at Golden State?
When Dallas lost in six games in 2007, it was an embarrassment. The Mavs had won 67 games after reaching the NBA Finals the previous season and seemed poised to capture that first Larry O’Brien Trophy. Don Nelson’s Warriors weren’t poised to do much of anything beyond barely making the playoffs. And yet it all ended so badly for Dallas.
This is different, but feels humbling in another way. The Mavericks were flying as high as one possibly can after knocking off the 64-win Suns in the second round. How much more difficult could Golden State be?
The answer so far is quite a bit. More than other sports, basketball is a game of matchups and the Mavericks’ small ball lineup exposed the anachronistic 7-footers that are so important to the Jazz and Suns. The Warriors simply play better small ball, have big men who can cover on the perimeter and are less prone to simply get blown away by 3-point shooting, although that’s mostly what happened in the first half of Game 4 Tuesday night, the contest that extended this series at least one more game.
Is it so unrealistic to think the Mavericks can reach that same level of ball movement to create open shots at the Chase Center? It took Dallas until its fourth try to win a game at Phoenix. The Mavericks don’t have the luxury of waiting that long in this series.
If you think there is a magic formula for all of this, there isn’t. When coaches and players say that sometimes it’s just about hitting shots, it really is. And even that doesn’t come with any secret codes. Reggie Bullock went 6 for 10 from the 3-point line Tuesday and the Mavs won Game 4. Try that again, right? Well, Bullock went 6 for 10 from the 3-point line in Game 2 and the Warriors won by nine.
Luka Doncic getting triple-doubles or something close to them seems to be a good thing. But Doncic scoring 40 points is usually somehow a bad thing (2-6 in his playoff history).
I can tell you that the Mavericks are 0-3 in the playoffs when Jalen Brunson doesn’t score at least 15. And they are 3-0 when Dorian Finney-Smith gets more than 15. Feed these young men, Luka!
Of course everything sails out the window if Warriors head coach Steve Kerr sends in his second unit for extended time again as we saw in the fourth quarter where the Mavericks had their 29-point lead slashed to eight before surviving to play another day. How much depth is one team allowed to have?
But Valentine was right when he said it was going to happen in baseball. He was just five years too early and had the wrong teams in mind.
It’s going to happen in the NBA, too. Portland made it all the way to Game 7 (and was tied at halftime) against the Mavericks in a reverse situation in 2003, and there was nothing so special about those Blazers.
Who’s to say one hot shooting game from a team with nothing to lose can’t at least bring basketball back to Dallas Saturday night?
