When the NBA finals commenced in Dallas ten days ago, the Miami Heat could little imagine that one of their best defensive “weapons” would come in the form of B-list Hollywood actor David Hasselhoff. Yesterday, as the Heat took an outrageous, controversial 3-2 series lead over the Dallas Mavericks and their best player Dirk Nowitzki, they seemed to have much for which to thank the Baywatch “star”.
Miami won game five of the best-of-seven series 101-100 in overtime, becoming only the second team in finals history to win the three home games sandwiched in the middle of the 2-3-2 format.
The victory, from a Miami team aiming to become only the third in history to win the championship after falling 2-0 behind, was memorable for a sublime 43-point performance from their young talisman Dwyane Wade, including two winning free throws with 1.9 seconds remaining in overtime.
It was also memorable for the furious scenes that followed the final buzzer. Avery Johnson, the Dallas coach, angered that Wade had been awarded a foul in the first place, indicated that he wanted to call a time-out after the Heat player’s second attempt, a common tactic that would enable the Mavs to in-bound the ball at half court instead of their own end.
The referees, however, awarded the time-out in the gap between Wade’s two attempts, denying Dallas that advantage, and leading to tempestuous scenes with the Mavs’ volatile owner Mark Cuban, who was already furious that Jerry Stackhouse had been suspended for a hard foul in game four, storming on to court and attempting to confront David Stern, the NBA commissioner, in the stands.
Advertisement
“Wade went to the free-throw line pretty much as often as our whole team,” Johnson said. “Then the signal was for the time-out to come after the second free throw but it was assumed we wanted it at that time.
“We’ve been in this situation a million times. Most people who’ve been involved in the NBA for 20-30 years know we wouldn’t want a time-out then. We were pretty dumbfounded. Now we just need to focus on one game and it’ll be good to get a little home cooking.”
Aside from the controversy, the contest was also memorable for another unproductive evening from German forward Nowitzki, the Maverick who was expected to dominate and use the platform of the finals as his opportunity to live up to the comparisons he has attracted with the great Larry Bird.
Nowitzki had made the mistake, during an earlier play-off round, of revealing that he hums tunes to himself to focus at the free-throw line including, improbably enough, a song by Hasselhoff that had been a hit during his childhood in Germany.
Miami supporters responded by chanting “David Hasselhoff” at Nowitzki every time he took a free-throw at the American Airlines Arena, more than 20,000 of them waving cut-out face masks of the actor in one of the more surreal images from NBA history.
Advertisement
Whatever the value of such a tactic, Nowitzki, a 90 per cent free-throw shooter during the regular season, missed a crucial one at the end of game three and, again, with 86 seconds left in regulation time yesterday, a miss that allowed Wade to make an audacious driving shot that tied the game at 93-93 with 2.8 seconds left in normal time.
In defence of the 7ft 1in German, he did make an equally impressive basket with nine seconds left in the extra period that handed the Mavs a 100-99 lead and set the scene for Wade to make one last heroic play, his drive past to the basket taking him past three defenders and ending in a foul and two successful free throws, much to Dallas’s fury.
Compared to Wade’s 43, 17 of which came in the tension-packed fourth period, Nowitzki had only 20, eclipsed by team-mates Jason Terry’s 35 points and Josh Howard’s 25. Another performance like that from Nowitzki and Miami will probably join the 1969 Boston Celtics and 1977 Portland Trailblazers as the only teams to win a 4-2 finals series after losing the opening two matches.
“We haven’t won in Dallas for four years,” Pat Riley, the Heat coach who now faces the last two games in Texas , said. “So the law of averages are with us. It’s going to take a lot more than that but I’d much rather go there like this, one game from the championship, than having to win two in a row. So we’ll see.”