DALLAS — For 39 minutes, everything teetered.
This first-round playoff series. The Los Angeles Clippers’ window of championship opportunity. When the 18,324 inside American Airlines Center were at their loudest Friday night, whacking together team-provided noisemakers and swinging white towels, it felt like even the red-brick building itself shook.
The Clippers had led Game 6 by five points, only to trail Dallas by nine. Los Angeles made inexplicable mistakes. Its stars had struggled to create shots against Dallas’ 2-3 zone. Then Kawhi Leonard scored 15 consecutive points to end the third quarter.
This game, a close-out opportunity for the Mavericks, became the series itself, with neither team capable of grabbing hold of its opportunities to wrest away control. And every single second of it became decided in the final 9:16. As one superstar, Dallas’ Luka Doncic, re-entered a tie game, Leonard hopped up from the opposing bench to do the same.
No one yet knows how far the Clippers will play into this postseason. For now it continues to a Game 7 at Staples Center on Sunday because of what Leonard did during those nine minutes, when he stared down Doncic, an offseason full of questions and a full building by scoring 12 season-saving points that instantly go down as one of the iconic moments in this franchise’s frustrated playoff history.
Leonard patiently dribbled side-to-side before drilling two three-pointers at the top of the arc, one over Doncic, then another over Dorian Finney-Smith, to draw this series even at three games apiece with a 104-97 win.
Leonard scored 45 points, even while walking with a limp during breaks in play after falling hard in the first half.
Reggie Jackson added 25 points and nine rebounds while Paul George had 20 points with 13 rebounds, but this was Leonard’s game, the type of performance the Clippers so badly wanted when they signed him as a free agent two years ago — and the type of show they hope to keep during this offseason, when he becomes an unrestricted free agent.
Had Friday veered differently, offseason talk would have been all that filled the air around the Clippers as soon as the horn ended, but even as Doncic scored 12 of his 29 points in the fourth quarter, Leonard was a class better, sending teammates leaping off the sideline while denying Dallas its first series victory in a decade.
This is now the first playoff series in NBA history where the road team has won the first six games.
The Clippers committed 14 turnovers and missed 24 of their 34 three-pointers but failed to fold.
