Kawhi Leonard, Clippers dominate Mavs in final minutes to force a Game 7 in LA

Each Kawhi Leonard basket in the final five minutes let a little more air out of American Airlines Center.

Each shot hushed the raucous crowd and dimmed the Mavericks’ chances of closing out the Clippers on this Friday night until finally Dallas’ hopes were extinguished.

The Clippers 104-97 victory behind Leonard’s 45 points tied this series at 3-3, setting up a winner-take-all Game 7 at 2:30 p.m. Sunday in Los Angeles’ Staples Center.

“Game 7, it doesn’t matter where you are,” said Luka Doncic. “You’ve got to leave everything on the court.”

Dallas’ best hope of pulling out their first playoff series victory since the 2011 NBA Finals may be the sheer oddity of the fact that the road team has won every game of this series.

“I don’t think there can ever be anything negative about playing at home,” Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle said of his team’s inability to win at home despite boisterous crowd support. “That just doesn’t seem possible.”

And yet here we are, with a Game 7 scenario that makes little sense.

The Mavericks got 29 points from Luka Doncic and 23 from Tim Hardaway Jr., but Dallas’ offense wilted under the pressure of Los Angeles’ defense in the final quarter.

The Mavericks led 77-73 after three quarters and again at 85-84 after a Tim Hardaway Jr. 3-point play with 7:36 left.

But the Clippers dominated the final minutes, though fans and Mavericks players disapproved of some referee calls.

“I don’t want to talk about the officiating,” Doncic said. “Everybody saw the game.”

This is the first playoff series in NBA history in which the home teams have won none of the first six games. The only other time the first five games of a series were won by the visiting team was the 1995 Western Conference finals between Houston and San Antonio.

It will be the seventh Game 7 in Mavericks history. Dallas is 4-2 in those games. That includes 1-2 on the road, the only victory being the overtime win over San Antonio in the 2006 Western Conference semifinals.

In NBA playoff history, Game 7s have been won by the home team 77% of the time (108-31).

If the Mavericks beat the odds and win Game 7, this series will join the 2019 World Series won by Washington over Houston as the only seven-game series in MLB, NBA or NHL history in which the road team won every game.

A loss, however, would relegate the Mavericks to NBA infamy. They’d be the fifth team to win the first two games of a series on the road and still get ousted.

Entering this postseason, NBA teams that have taken a 2-0 lead of any kind have gone on to win 93.4% of the time (297-21). As Mavericks fans well know, those 21 victims include Dallas in the 2006 NBA Finals.

In those Finals Dallas not only led 2-0 in games, but had an 89-76 lead with 6:34 left in Game 3. Though this is just a first-round series, if this Dallas goes on to lose it, too, will have a cruel timestamp on its season epitaph: A 2-0 series advantage and 30-11 lead in Game 3.

And going 0-3 at home, including the chance to close out the series in Game 6.

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