DALLAS — If there’s such thing as saving face in the NBA Finals, Luka Doncic did it Friday night.
He went into Game 4 under such intense scrutiny that coach Jason Kidd blasted the media in his pregame press conference for “personal attacks.” And frankly, Kidd was right. The Mavericks don’t have much depth. Their only playmakers are Doncic and Kyrie Irving. Their third-best player is… P.J. Washington or Derek Lively II.
I get your point: there aren’t many options.
Doncic has led the Mavericks to a tough Western Conference battle and a place few thought possible. The 25-year-old receives painkiller injections before every game to deal with injuries. Any other player would have a sonnet written in honor of reaching Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
But Doncic was criticized for being out of shape and immature. Perhaps the media is overcompensating to create an angle in covering a less dramatic NBA Finals following a less dramatic conference finals. Or perhaps European players still have a greater burden of proof to American audiences.
Sure, Doncic played badly in Game 3 — he got turned on defense and fouled out in the fourth quarter — and the refs should have just waited to blow the whistle on that play — but he’ll never be mistaken for an All-Defensive candidate.
Waiting for Doncic to transform into a top-tier perimeter stopper is like waiting for the DMV to become an efficient government agency. It’s not going to happen. Just take your number and sit back. But defensive deficiencies didn’t stop Larry Bird, Dirk Nowitzki and Stephen Curry from ascending to the top.
“If you’ve watched the Mavs, you know Luka’s defense has improved, but there’s also this push for him to be a shutdown defender. He’s never been an All-Defensive Team, but he’s been a first-team All-Pro five times,” Kidd said. “I mean, he’s one of the top five players in the world. … But when you get to the biggest stage, somebody’s got to fill in the gaps. And that only makes the great players even better. With LeBron, [James]Michael [Jordan]The greats, the GOATs, they’ve all taken hits and come back stronger and better.”
Doncic certainly responded well Friday night. He scored 29 points in just 33 minutes in the Mavericks’ 122-84 victory, avoiding a sweep and extending the series to at least three days. Just as important, Doncic was more mobile defensively, picked up three steals and finished with a game-high plus-30.
The Celtics shot just 36 percent from the field and were trailing by as many as 48 points, but they were played hard and were completely defeated. Given how the game unfolded, it’s hard to believe the Celtics were only able to score 84 points against a player as defensively porous as Doncic.
Boston is a great team overall, but prone to inexplicable missteps, like their first-round loss to a severely undermanned Heat (a 10-point loss), their second-round loss to the Cavaliers (a 24-point loss) and their worst game on Friday.
“I don’t even know how to answer that,” Jaylen Brown said when asked why Boston played so poorly. “Next question.”
So the celebration has been postponed, and for Game 5 on Monday, the champagne will take place on the ice inside TD Garden.
The result, and of course the goal difference, was surprising.
The American Airlines Center was packed with Celtics fans hoping to celebrate. They weren’t the majority, but they were there. The Mavericks knew the Green Wave was coming. An arena employee told me that security guards were ordered to confiscate brooms at the entrance.
In the end, the broom would have been useless.
“It’s really that simple. It doesn’t need to be complicated. This isn’t surgery,” Kidd said. “Our group was ready to go. They were ready to celebrate. You have to understand, we fought back. We were desperate. We had to keep playing like that. You have to understand they were going to find a way to close the door.”
“The hardest thing in this league is to close the door on a win against a team that has nothing to lose. You saw that tonight. They let go of the rope pretty early on.”
