Denver Nuggets knocked this Wednesday at the gates of heaven for their first NBA title with an away victory, the second in the series, against the Miami Heat. The score, which ended 109-94 and left the tie at 2-1, did not tell the whole story of a game split in half. In the first, equality was constant and sticky. In the second, the dream of getting the tie on track against his team gradually got out of hand for the Heat.
The thing seemed doomed with three minutes remaining in the game and the flocks of fans from Miami dressed in white, who welcomed at home, and after two games in Denver, their first final in nine years, began to leave the stadium en masse. Kaseya Center. No one likes to wallow in disappointment, but traffic is a matter not to be taken lightly on game day in a major American city.
They had the frustration marked on their faces with the two most heard words of the night on the stadium’s public address system: Nikola Jokic, the main source of their misfortunes. The Nuggets star, in addition to a great game, made history by becoming the first player to score 30 points, grab 20 rebounds and give 10 assists in a final. To be exact, he actually had 32 points and 21 rebounds.
Paradoxically, it was in those final three minutes that Miami seemed to rise from its ashes. He got to nine points. But, oh, the miracle stayed in the waiting room and the Heat coach, Erik Spoelstra, and the fans, only had one consolation left: to take out a modest local legend, Udonis Haslem, with twenty seconds left in the final. . He retires at the end of the season, after two decades of faithful service, he could at least get a standing ovation.
The script of the night changed at the beginning of the third quarter, when the Denver team, after two hard quarters, took off with a double-digit lead that never went away. The difference escalated to 21 points at two and a half minutes of the last quarter. Spoelstra then called a timeout. The music turned up, an accelerated version of Mommy, what will the black man want, but the audience, which had started off strong, was already lost, like his team.
Before it was time for the consolation prizes, the game had started with the Heat coming out eager to prove in a hurry that they were capable of achieving what their against-the-odds win in Denver risked last Sunday. You had to seize the moment: it was the first time in the postseason that the Heat did not go into their third game with a 2-0 score. It was also the first time they had lost at home, after nine games without doing so. The initial boot up worked for them for about eight minutes. By then, Jokic, with his effortlessly infallible half-European style of his, was already advancing like a confident general through the enemy positions. The rush and nerves of the local team resulted in one missed opportunity to establish themselves after another.
The first quarter ended with double equality: in the score between the two teams and in the points scored, 10, by the stars of both franchises: Jimmy Butler (who finished with 28 points, compared to Sam Adebayo’s 22) and Jokic . In the ranks of the Nuggets, Jamal Murray, who signed another great game, was the top scorer, with 34 points.
The next meeting is on Friday, again in Miami, where the dream of winning the fourth championship in its history (after those of 2006, 2012 and 2013) is still alive among its fans., still not really believing it. “It’s enough that we’ve come this far.” , said Big Dan Vainberg, shortly before the game on Wednesday and at the end of a season in which almost nobody gave a penny for them.
The statistics still do not show it: there is no team on the shelves that finished eighth seed in the Eastern Conference that has reached the ring final. This year, the Heat narrowly qualified in the do-or-die playoffs of the play-in, but then they contradicted those who underestimated them by taking ahead, against all odds and in that order, the Milwaukee Bucks, the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics, who were left at the gates last season and were the favorites for glory since this half of the country.
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Source: EL PAIS
