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Preamble
Do you believe in the concept of cheating? While there has never been a scientific consensus on their existence, they are accepted almost as a matter of faith in sports circles. That might make us a bit superstitious, but we’ve seen it too many times. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, say something like this: A highly favored team on a winning streak is programmed to play against a weaker opponent, possibly with fewer staff, and they somehow end up losing. Sometimes great.
Maybe it’s just a matter of things that happen: no team is good enough to win every game and no team is bad enough to lose every game. Perhaps. Sometimes, however, it seems that a team becomes overconfident and faces a team that rightly feels they have nothing to lose. The results are … well, the results are very similar to what we saw in Game 3 of the NBA Finals.
The Los Angeles Lakers were up 2-0 over a Miami Heat team that was missing Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic. The pregame conversation wasn’t whether the Heat could come back, that seemed out of the question, but whether the next two games were worth playing. This was going to be a sweep.
Without two of its three biggest starters, Miami had exactly one path to victory: Leader Jimmy Butler was going to have to have a monster game and the Lakers would have to make some mistakes. Well, they both happened on Sunday. Butler played one of the best singles games of all time in Finals history, taking advantage of a Lakers team that was committing an absurd amount of unforced turnovers. It seemed like the Lakers believed in hype, the Heat outplayed them in everything, and as a result, we could have a series on our hands.
Here’s the catch: it’s hard to count on both of these to happen in a second game in a row. Butler cannot be expected to have a 40-point triple-double in his second straight game and everything we know about LeBron James tells us that he is not going to leave his team (and the Lakers are very much his team) out of the game. hook. after Sunday’s surprisingly unfocused effort. In other words, Game 4 will not be a cheat game, they know exactly how the Heat could beat them.
If the Lakers win, they’re up 3-1 in the series and all the pressure is on Miami to win three games in a row. It’s better than being 3-0 down, but not by much. However, if the Heat can match this … well, we have one of the most unexpectedly competitive NBA Finals we’ve seen in a long time.
The stakes could not be higher. Do you have thoughts / comments / jokes / what do you have? Send them our way and we will use them throughout this blog. You can send emails to [email protected] or Tweet @HunterFelt. It’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals with the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat at the Magic Kingdom. The game is scheduled to start at 9pm EST, but we’ll be here long before then.
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