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Curry drills game-winning three in closing seconds to sink Mavericks

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The Warriors have a target on their backs, and lately, no team in the NBA has hit the bull’s-eye as well as the Mavericks.

Despite a 13-25 record, Dallas entered Wednesday evening’s game with a league-best four-game win streak, and the Mavericks played like a team that planned to challenge for Western Conference supremacy instead of a high lottery pick.

But even though the Mavericks turned in one of their best performances of the season, as Steph Curry three-point dagger with three seconds left broke a tie game and pushed the Warriors to a 125-122 win.

After a Harrison Barnes driving layup tied tied the game at 122-122, Curry drove down the court and worked off a screen from Draymond Green to hit the game-winner from the top of the arc. Curry’s three-point shot gave him 32 points on the night, which followed up a 38-point effort on Friday in his return from a sprained ankle.

 

While Curry’s heroics will steal the headlines from Wednesday, a third quarter skirmish between Warriors’ rookie Jordan Bell and Dallas veteran Devin Harris provided a fascinating subplot in what was otherwise a game that lacked much intrigue.

The last time the Golden State traveled to Dallas, Bell stole the spotlight with a garbage time dunk that angered Mavericks’ players and even upset several Warriors veterans. Bell’s off-the-backboard alley-oop to himself came with fewer than three minutes on the clock and after the Warriors had already built a 25-point advantage, so it clearly violated an unwritten code that exists in the NBA.

On Wednesday night, the Warriors returned to Dallas, and though Bell never had the opportunity to audition for the NBA’s upcoming slam dunk contest, he was once again a focus of a Mavericks’ team that clearly hasn’t forgotten the statement the rookie made earlier this year.

Even though the Warriors held a nine-point lead at the end of one and extended their advantage back up to nine points early in the fourth, Steve Kerr’s squad had a difficult time pulling away from a Mavericks’ team that was on a roll entering Wednesday. The combination of Rick Carlisle’s coaching prowess and rookie point guard Dennis Smith Jr’s recent hot streak has turned the Mavericks into one of the hottest teams in the NBA, and against Golden State, Dallas found an edge from beyond the three-point line.

Though Smith Jr. had an off night from the floor, Carlisle schemed up the Warriors well as the Mavericks dictated the pace and tempo for much of the game. Carlisle’s squad knocked down 19-of-42 three-point attempts, while the Warriors hit just 13-of-32 shots from beyond the arc. Dallas also made life difficult for Golden State when its starters were out of the game, as the Warriors’ bench delivered just 18 of the team’s 125 points.

Once the Warriors inserted Curry and Kevin Durant back in the game with six minutes to play in the fourth, Golden State began to put the game away. A Klay Thompson three-pointer followed by another Thompson jumper extended Golden State’s lead to 12, but the lead never reached a point where a Bell breakaway dunk would have been considered blatantly disrespectful.

Instead, the Warriors gave up a 10-point advantage in the final three minutes before Curry saved the team from a brutal collapse.