DALLAS (AP) — Stephen Curry shimmied for the TV crew, Andrew Wiggins shook Luka Doncic with a posterizing dunk and the Warriors are thinking sweep.
Curry scored 31 points, Wiggins’ playoff career high 27 points included the dunk that was originally called an offensive foul and Golden State beat the Dallas Mavericks 109-100 Sunday night for a 3-0 lead in the Western Conference finals.
“He’s looking like Dominique Wilkins out there,” Klay Thompson said of Wiggins after scoring 19 points as the Warriors moved to the brink of the NBA Finals, three years after the end of a five-year run that yielded three championships.
Golden State, which swept Portland in its most recent West finals in 2019 before Toronto won the title, goes for the sweep in Game 4 on Tuesday in Dallas. No team has rallied from 3-0 down to win an NBA playoff series.
Doncic scored 40 and beat the first-quarter buzzer with a 32-footer that got the crowd going with the Mavericks again at home trailing 2-0, as they did against top-seeded Phoenix before winning the West semifinal series in seven games.
But that shimmy-inducing bucket from the young superstar was a blip on an otherwise rough night from 3-point range for the Mavericks, who missed their first seven and finished 13 of 45.
Reggie Bullock and Maxi Kleber, two long-range specialists for Dallas, missed all 12 of their 3s combined and were 0-15 overall. Both went scoreless, offsetting Spencer Dinwiddie’s 26 points off the bench. Jalen Brunson scored 20.
Wiggins’ one-handed dunk over Doncic midway through the fourth quarter was called a foul because his elbow made contact around Doncic’s neck as Doncic jerked backward and fell. But the replay ruling after Kerr challenged was incidental contact, giving Golden State a 93-83 lead.
About a minute later, Wiggins, who matched his playoff career high with 11 rebounds, moved quickly down the right baseline for a follow dunk on a miss by Curry.
Curry scored 11 points in the third quarter, giving the Warriors their biggest lead at 78-64 with a step-back 3 in the final minute and turning to the national TV crew for a close-up view of his shoulder shimmy.