Dallas Mavericks Beat Oklahoma City Thunder In Game 3 But The Game Was Ugly According To NBA Fans

This game 3 was an ugly one according to other sports blogger because of the erratic plays coming mostly from the home team, Oklahoma City Thunder, particularly from Westbrook and Durant. They threw up some bad shots that they themselves knew that those shots were horrible. Just look at the picture of Durant above. That picture will tell the whole story of this game. Durant didn't shoot the ball as well as he usually does. But then again, after a few minutes of thinking about what really happened in this game, I can still say that this game was still an epic one because at first I thought Dallas will crumble against Oklahoma City (OKC) because OKC was leading by 15 points in the first quarter and also, OKC made a late comeback in the 4th quarter to scare Rick Carlisle and the Mavericks, but Dirk Nowitzki proved that he has a heart of a champion. He only had 18 points but his presence on the court made his team look good.

Dirk iced this game using his great shot selection skill and his patented fade away jumpers. This series is like a chess game wherein you've got to choose your shot well because one missed shot can spell a huge difference. This should be the mindset of Durant and Westbrook. I saw them shooting ill advice shots. Westbrook threw a three pointer with 2 minutes and 35 seconds remaining in the game clock. It didn't go in. Dallas was only leading by 8 points when he threw that shot. If he could have chosen to just drive the ball hard to the basket he might have been fouled or even got a three-point play. Durant also made some silly shots. He threw several three pointers and based from the trajectory of his shots, they were not as good compared to his shots in the first two games. He was really tired and he could've chosen to shoot from a shorter distance. He was getting his points from shooting perimeter shots than shooting three-pointers. Those are the main reasons why they lost in game 3 in their best of 7 Western Conference Finals series against Dallas. Imagine how Dallas had a walk in the park in the in the first half of game 3. They had a 23 points advantage in the start of the third quarter, but OKC made a late rally to cut Dallas' lead down to six in the 4th quarter but in the end Dallas won with the score of 93-87.

Let's get into the numbers of this game. To show how poor the shot selection is for OKC, they shot 0 ou of 15 from the 3-point land. They have just broken the worst three point field goal record set by the 2008 Jazz team which shot 0 out of 14 from the three point area. That's just a very awful figure if you're a Thunder fan. Let's just pray that they will be able to address this problem in the next few days because Game 4 will already be on Monday, Tuesday here in the Philippines. Also, in terms of offensive rebounds, Dallas' Tyson Chandler acted like a troll warlord in this game. He's the king of rebounds for Dallas.

In terms of physicality and harshness this game is excellent because all in all both teams garnered 41 fouls and I can say that most fouls are cheap and only some are quality fouls. When I say cheap fouls it means that the fouls are not necessarily related to the basketball game, they came because of other reasons that are remote from the rigors of the game itself. They came because of petty words and petty acts of players. In short, they came from unnecessary bad words and bad acts of players. And when I say quality fouls, these are fouls that are necessarily related to the game. Such as when an offensive player drives to the basket and the defensive player comes to foul him on his way up. That's what you call a quality foul. And I'd like to point out that out of those 41 fouls 12 of those are cheap fouls. Just like when Dirk shove Westbrook and then Westbrook retaliated. That was a classic cheap foul. 27 out of those 41 fouls was called in favor of OKC but OKC's free throw shooting was not that good and so they failed to fully capitalize on those fouls.


The referees made sure that they will call this game really tight that's why there were many fouls but that didn't make this game more appealing to the fans. They distorted the very essence of competition wherein the teams and their sheer efforts in getting the win were being removed by the referees through calling fouls more often. The referees want this series to be less physical and less inimical to both of these teams. In effect the thrill was lessen. The referees must hold their horses in terms of calling fouls because this series will not reach its potential if they will continue to call it too tight. From a fan's point of view, this series is shaping to be ugly if this trend continues.


Here's the game 3 of Dallas versus OKC replay video highlights from YouTube.