DALLAS — The Dallas Mavericks had two options.
Pack for Boston or pack for a vacation.
Boston awaits.
With the biggest margin of victory in title round history, the NBA Finals aren’t over yet.
Luka Doncic scored 25 of his 29 points in the first half, Kyrie Irving added 21 and the Mavericks extended their season strong by avoiding elimination with a dominant 122-84 win over the Celtics in Game 4 on Friday night.
The 38-point final margin of victory was the third-largest in NBA Finals history, behind Chicago’s 96-54 win over Utah in 1998 and the Celtics’ 131-92 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers in 2008.
“It’s really simple. It doesn’t need to be complicated. This isn’t surgery,” Mavericks coach Jason Kidd said. “Our team was ready to go. They were ready to celebrate and we fought back. We were desperate. We’ve got to keep playing like that. They’re trying to close the door. The hardest thing in this league is to close the door against a team that has nothing to lose. You saw that tonight.”
The Mavericks’ stars were ejected by the end of the third quarter, and for good reason.
Dallas dominated the game from the start, leading by 13 points at the end of the first quarter, 26 points at halftime and 38 points in the third quarter before both teams emptied their benches.
Before Friday, the Celtics’ worst NBA Finals loss, a 17-time champion team, was a 137-104 loss to the Lakers in 1984.
This was even worse.
Sometimes it’s even worse.
Dallas blew a 48-point lead into the fourth quarter, the largest deficit the Celtics have faced this season.
The Celtics lead the series 3-1 with Game 5 set for Monday in Boston.
“Preparation isn’t an automatic guarantee of success,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said. “I thought we had a great process. We had great shooting practice. We had a great film session yesterday. I thought the guys came out with the right intentions. I just thought things didn’t go our way and I thought Dallas outplayed us. They just played harder.”
The loss was Boston’s first in five weeks, ended the Celtics’ franchise-longest postseason winning streak at 10 consecutive games and ended their chance to become the first team in NBA history to win both a conference finals and the Finals 4-0.
For the Celtics, Jayson Tatum scored 15 points, Sam Hauser had 14, and Jaylen Brown and Jrue Holiday each had 10 points.
Tim Hardaway Jr. scored 15 points in the fourth quarter alone, and Dallas’ Derek Lively II had 11 points and 12 rebounds.
It was Lively who gave a hint early in the game that it was going to be a good night for the Mavs.
He made the first three-pointer of his NBA career midway through the first quarter to give the Mavs a decisive lead.
They took off running.
And I kept running.
“Nothing changes,” Doncic said. “Like I said at the beginning of this series, the fourth win is the game. And we’ll keep believing until the end. We just have to keep going. I really believe this team can do it.”
The halftime score was 61-35, and Dallas had given up a ton of points in the first 24 minutes.
The Mavericks went into the intermission making just 5 of 15 3-pointers and 10 of 16 free throws, but were still in complete control.
“I think it’s hard to win. I think it’s hard to win any game, but it’s really hard to win Game 4 of the NBA Finals,” Holiday said. “I think they came out desperate and beat us down. We didn’t bounce back like we wanted to.”
There were plenty of first-half faux pas for Boston, some of which were historic.
— The 35 points were the fewest the Celtics have scored in a combined first and second half in Mazzulla’s two seasons as coach.
The 26-point halftime deficit was Boston’s second-largest deficit of the season. The Celtics were trailing Milwaukee by 37 points at halftime on Jan. 11, but had trailed by double digits at halftime just eight times in their first 99 games this season.
— The halftime deficit was Boston’s largest deficit in an NBA Finals game and the 35-point deficit was the Celtics’ second-worst first half deficit. On June 15, 2010, the Celtics were held to 31 points in Game 6 of their series against the Lakers, but the Lakers went on to win Game 7 to clinch the series.
Even in a season where comebacks have become easier than ever, teams that held leads of 23 or more at halftime were down 76-0 before Friday night.
Let’s make it 77-0.
Coincidentally, it’s Doncic’s jersey number.
The Celtics certainly thought that cutting into Dallas’ lead even a little at the start of the second half would make the game more interesting.
Instead, the Mavs made a quick run to win, going on a 15-7 run over the first 4:32 of the third quarter to extend Dallas’ lead to 76-42.
Any hopes that Boston could pull off a big fight back and complete the sweep were long gone.
Mazzulla replaced all of his starters at the same time with 3:18 left in the third quarter and Dallas leading 88-52.
“We’re hoping to be better on Monday,” Celtics center Al Horford said.
The Mavs have the toughest challenge yet in this series — no team in NBA history has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit — but they’ve taken a first step.
“We have nothing to lose,” Kidd said.
