Mavs-Heat showdown one of closest NBA Finals series

Dallas — The Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat keep taking their NBA finals games down to the final minute. The difference in the last three games has been a single shot, with each decided by three points or less.

“It’s just a slugfest right now,” Heat forward Chris Bosh said on Wednesday. And a rarity.

There have been only two other NBA finals where three consecutive games were decided by no more than three points. And those were back in 1947 and 1948 — the first championship series ever played.

Dallas won 86-83 on Tuesday to even this series at two games apiece. Game 5 is on Thursday in Dallas before the series shifts back to Miami.

The Heat had won Game 3 88-86 after the Mavericks’ 95-93 victory in Game 2.

When the Philadelphia Warriors won the first finals in 1947, the last three games were decided by a combined seven points. There were three more close games in the middle of the 1948 series that the Warriors lost to the Baltimore Bullets.

If the Heat and Mavericks have another game in this series decided by three points or less — and they have at least two more chances, maybe three — it would be only the third NBA finals to have four such games. The only times that has happened so far were in the 1957 and 1958 series matching the Boston Celtics and St. Louis Hawks.

“We expected every game to be a close game, and every game has been a close game,” Heat forward Udonis Haslem said.
The most lopsided game so far was Miami’s 92-84 victory in Game 1.

Since those Celtics-Hawks series more than a half-century ago, when each team won a championship, there have been only four other NBA finals with three games decided by three points or less.

The last before this year? The 2006 finals between the Mavericks and Heat, when the average margin in the six games was only nine points. AP