Gabe Vincent scored a career-high 29 points, Duncan Robinson added 22 and the eighth-seeded Miami Heat moved within one victory of the NBA Finals after beating the Boston Celtics 128-102 on Sunday in the NBA Finals. Game 3 of the East. Lecture title series.
Caleb Martin scored 18, Jimmy Butler finished with 16, Bam Adebayo had 13 and Max Strus added 10 for Miami, which leads the series 3-0. Every team in NBA history that won the first three games of a best-of-seven game ultimately prevailed; the Heat are 8-0 in that situation.
Jayson Tatum scored 14 and Jaylen Brown added 12 for the Celtics, who won three times on the court in Miami en route to winning last season’s Eastern Conference finals but simply never got a chance in this one and basically emptied the bench. for the last quarter.
Grant Williams and Payton Pritchard each had 12 for Boston. Game 4 is Tuesday in Miami.
The NBA Finals start on June 1, and with the way things are going, that could mean the league is about to go a few days without games. The Western Conference finals could end on Monday; Denver leads that series against the Los Angeles Lakers 3-0. And now, the Eastern finals could end on Tuesday.
There has never been a season where both conference finals have ended in sweeps; It happened in 1957 in the division finals immediately preceding the title series, when Boston beat Syracuse 3-0 and St. Louis beat Minneapolis 3-0.
Of all the 3-0 series leads in NBA history, this might be the most unexpected: a No. 8 seed on the Heat, a team that struggled only to make the playoffs, a team that was less than within 3 minutes of being eliminated in the play-in tournament, beating first-seeded Milwaukee in five games, then fifth-seeded New York in six, and now on the brink of denying the second-seeded Celtics a second straight crown from the east.
And the Heat let Boston know how much they were enjoying it.
Aware that Boston’s Al Horford directed a timeout signal toward the Miami bench during Game 1 when the Celtics were in a second quarter to build a comfortable lead, Butler did the same to Horford as the Heat pulled away in the third. game room. 3.
Plus, the Heat rallied to win Game 1 anyway. The Heat didn’t require a rally in Game 3. There was barely a try by the Celtics, for that matter.
Boston pulled within 61-49 when Marcus Smart had a three-point play on the opening possession of the second half. The rest was all of Miami, which responded immediately with a 28-7 run to open up a 33-point lead at 89-56, which got the building rolling. The lead was so great, and there was so much time left, that the sold-out crowd of 20,088 was a little off by the time it was over.
They could have been yelled at. Or maybe they were saving it for hockey on Monday night, when the Florida Panthers, another No. 8 seed in a magical playoff run in South Florida, will try to take a 3-0 lead in their final series of the This one against the Carolina Hurricanes.
