Clippers force Game 7 on Kawhi Leonard’s clutch play, 45 points

For 39 minutes, everything teetered.

This first-round playoff series. The 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 he 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.

The Clippers’ Game 6 plan hinged on making Doncic as uncomfortable as possible. But even with an outstretched hand of Reggie Jackson directly in his face in the corner, or Marcus Morris draped all over him as he faded backward on one of his turnaround jumpers, Doncic made shots look easy that would be ill-advised for just about anyone else in the NBA. They felt like gut punches to a Clippers defense scrambling for anything to slow down the superstar guard after 11 first-quarter points.

Jackson matched Doncic shot-for-shot and more on the way to 14 first-quarter points — and yet each attempt taken by Jackson, and not Leonard or George, felt like a victory for Dallas’ defense and unsustainable for the Clippers.

After leading the NBA with 41.1% three-point shooting in the regular season, the Clippers’ deep accuracy entering Friday ranked just seventh among postseason teams, at 36.6%. Seemingly searching for any kind of shooting spark against a Mavericks 2-3 zone daring the Clippers’ non-All-Stars to shoot, coach Tyronn Lue inserted Luke Kennard for only the second time all series early in the second quarter.

Kennard, ultimately, didn’t alter the second quarter’s course. Leonard did.

After only three points in the first quarter, Leonard scored 13 in the second to spark an 18-6 run, and his team led by three at halftime, but only after the Clippers had fallen behind by nine, a critical moment when the game could have teetered.

All that work was undone, for a second consecutive game, by a five-minute stretch in the third quarter that will haunt the Clippers. Leading by five after halftime, the Clippers couldn’t stop Boban Marjanovic’s easy shots inside, Tim Hardaway Jr.’s personal 7-0 run or self-inflicted errors such as George’s pass directly to Doncic — one of his five turnovers — and Jackson’s defensive mistake when he strayed one step too far away from his man, only for Doncic to find him for a three-pointer.

Leonard scored the Clippers’ next 13 points but they still trailed by four entering the final quarter.

He returned to the bench for a three-minute breather.

Then he re-entered and breathed life back into his team’s season.