Wow.

124-103.

Not nearly an indication of how lopsided this game was.

Dallas leading by as many as 36 and punching their ticket to the NBA Finals where they will take on the Boston Celtics a week from tonight in Boston.

That'll be game one.

It will be.

Hey, good luck to our friends at ESPN, ABC.

Y'all gonna do a fabulous job.

We didn't have to worry about the closers tonight, did we?

No, we didn't.

No fourth quarter clutch time stats to crunch, that's for sure.

Let's get to the highlights and we'll talk about this one.

And it was absolutely, from the start, Dallas, especially that guy, as he said, he was going to lead the way on this night and he scored 20 in the first quarter.

Minnesota had 19.

Yeah, he just said, follow me on this is what the big time players do, they step up.

He has this ability along with Kyrie, but he just came out.

He was feeling it.

Listen, honey, when you're a superstar, you hate to have two bad games in a row.

So if you have a bad game, I love superstars to come out and show themselves.

Kyrie was great in game one.

Luca was now closed in game five.

The difference is also being able to play one on one when you're one of the best one on one players in the world makes your job a lot easier.

What's funny too, Shaq, as you say, they don't want to have two bad games in a row and that's coming off a triple double, 28, 15 and 10 that he had in game four.

Here in game five, 20 in the first quarter finishes, 36, 10 and five.

Yeah, but offensive wise, he took some shots and they weren't going and they were definitely going tonight.

Apparently somebody was in the stands, waving the towel, calling him a cry baby and he said, who's the cry baby now?

All right.

PJ Washington connecting there and this thing starting to get out of hand at 56, 36.

There's Kyrie.

Kyrie 32.

Shot a three-pointer off the glass for the pass.

Oh, Derrick Lively.

Another shot to the head.

This one from Nas Reed.

I think he got very lucky.

I think he was more scared than anything.

Well, he did hit him in the head, but it's all right.

Flagrant one was the call against Reed and this coming to a guy lively who had sat out game four after Carl Anthony Townsend kneed him in the back of the head and caused that neck injury.

Here's Luca.

Yeah, that's too easy.

I mean, here it is one-on-one.

You know, he plays against Shamgard, assistant coach, one-on-one every day like that.

It's like, there's no real defense there.

And the same in here.

You put guys like this on the island and you're going to be on Gilligan's Island.

Well, at least it was quick and painless.

Well, it wasn't quick.

It took 48 minutes.

36.

Oh, got him.

36 for Donchik.

36 for Kyrie.

That's 72, Ernie.

Thank you so much, Dr. O'Neal.

Come on, man.

Come on, man.

Play one-on-one.

Oh, yeah.

You know what's crazy?

He was practicing that shot off the glass.

No, he doesn't.

Yes, he was.

He was before the game.

I promise you it.

He was making that.

Yes.

124 to 103 is your final score as the Mavs shoot 55% for the game, 43% for Mavs.

And Luka Donchik is the MVP of the Western Conference Finals.

So there's your score, a 21-point finish but a 36-point lead for Dallas, 56-win season for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Great year.

Comes to a close.

Great year.

The Mavs win five games here in the Western Conference Finals.

Here's their head coach, Chris Finch.

Luka came out tonight, put his stamp on the game, you know, hit a couple of bomb threes that kind of got them really loosened up.

And then, you know, offensively, we were kind of never really settled in.

Their physicality bothered us.

And so the game kind of slipped away from us in the first quarter when we missed a lot of easy stuff, you know, went one-on-one too early, just kind of got busted out of any kind of offensive structure, you know, and then we couldn't get stopped.

So that was the game.

Seems like people believe that a younger player's younger team have to go through these before you can get.

Do you believe that was the case, where guys just not quite as ready for the moment as?

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's some of that, you know, but we had chances early on in this series to make it, you know, more of an even series, you know, and there was probably going to be one of these games in this series, one direction or another, and, you know, tonight for us, it was, it went against us in a big way, so.

Just that simple.

He had like three shots from the logo, so pretty much nothing we can do about it.

How, what's your emotions as the season now comes to an end about what you accomplished and where it fell short?

I just said we'll be back next year.

Do you think this is something that you just have to go through experience to kind of build on?

Unfortunately, it's going through with a loss, but I guess so.

What do you think of it?

And what do you think about this Mavs group and their potential of what they could accomplish in the finals?

What do you think you can take from what they did to stop you personally in this series and apply it to next year and beyond?

Nothing.

When you kind of look back on this series, maybe early in the series, what do you think this team could have done better, especially on the offensive end of the floor, to try and counteract some of what Dallas was throwing at you?

We never clicked all together as a team in this series.

Not in not even one game.

I think that was the main thing.

Like no, like the last two series, we was all clicking at one time, making shots and stuff.

We wasn't clicking at one time.

Kind of like those lines.

Chuck, how do you, I know we all have certain feelings when we go into a game.

I wonder how, you know, I feel like if you thought, you thought Minnesota at home would blow them out and ride this wave of emotion.

How do you explain what we saw tonight?

It's hard to explain because it's kind of like game one.

They came out and got punched in the mouth and never recovered.

Like when Kyrie came out and punched me in the mouth in game one, Luca did that tonight, but I was very disappointed because I thought they would ride that wave of last game coming home.

This place going crazy.

I, I really thought we were going back to Dallas, but man, they, they were flat for some reason.

I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm really, it was embarrassing, Ernie, you know, you said earlier that's final score.

That's not indicative how bad, how close it was.

It seems to me that when they were happy with it, once they didn't get swept, they were happy and they kind of lost focus.

Like I was also with Chuck, I thought this place was going to be crazy.

I thought Ant was going to go off, Cat was going to go off again, take it to a game six where the pressure now shifts on Dallas, but like we said, they came out with no sense of urgency and let Luca get like, it's easier said than done with those two guys, but you have to try to show something after like Luca just came out with the Ole defense and he just went crazy.

And then he took a couple of minutes off and then Kyrie went crazy and it was over.

It was over from the start.

And I want to say something too, Ernie, you know, you said something the other night.

That in all five games, can you agree or disagree?

That ain't the team defensively we saw in game one and game two against Denver.

No, I mean, because that's something close.

Game one, game two defensively, some of the best defense I've ever seen.

And they, they didn't play any more games like that in Denver and they didn't play in any one game like that.

This series.

Yeah, I don't think, you know, they made it at times Jamal Murray uncomfortable in the perimeter players for Denver and even Jokic here.

No one felt uncomfortable in the five games, even in the loss.

The one thing about riding a wave, Ernie, I think you still have to have a wave of execution.

And at no point that could, could I trust in this series that they were going to execute, you know, these are the greatest players in the world.

You know, top 50 players of all time, probably top 20 of all time, you know, yeah, you ain't top 20.

I am.

I was the youngest top top players of all time.

There you go.

Much better.

There's, there's a game plan that they, they walk into the arena with against each series.

We talked about that.

I have time.

Now let's say a person that's in my position, what would be my game plan?

I'm going to get the ball from free throw to free throw line as fast as I can.

I'm going to sprint into my shot.

Once the double team occurs, I'm sprinting into threes.

So you have a game plan.

I never saw a concerted game plan against Dallas.

And I saw a change, especially on the defensive end.

They doubled at times.

They didn't double at times.

They, they just let them kind of dictate everything offensively, which is difficult.

And maybe next year they'll know that they have to be a little bit more consistent.

And I want to say one thing, Ernie.

I talk about the trees that Nico made to make the mouth.

I got to give Luke and Kyrie some credit.

They actually look like they're trying to play defense now.

And as the two best players and the leaders on this team, we talked about it this series.

We never thought we'd say, man, that Luke is playing good defense, that Kyrie's playing good defense.

But as the two leaders of this team, they brought in all them other defenders, but give those two guys credit.

And as I, as I spoke with Nico Harrison after the game, really, you go back to the acquisition of Kyrie Irving, and then you look at the drafts, so you don't make the playoffs.

And Oklahoma City, you make the deal, the draft night deal, Case and Wallace for Derek

Lively.

And Derek Lively becomes an integral piece of this, of this puzzle for Dallas at the age of what, 19 or 20 years old.

What do all three of those players have in, in, in common?

Because the old Mavs team, they had just a bunch of little three-point shooters out there.

All three of those guys about physicality and size, even Derek Jones.

But when you go back and look, when they first put that team together, what was the criticism?

Man, they just going to try to outscore people.

Yeah.

Nico bought in all these size defenders, and it changed the whole-

And rebound the ball, because their rebound differential was horrible, and they get Gafford in there, you get P.J.

Washington in there.

Again, he's pushed every button perfectly.

It's easy, hey, it's a lot easier to push some buttons when you got them other two nuclear weapons out there.

Yeah, but sometimes they push the button.

So go ahead, you can put a period on this.

Yeah, when you have two megastars, and you got nine or ten others that buy in and, you know, play their roles to a T, it's easy to win.

You know, a lot of us thought that the Kyrie and Luka thing wouldn't work, but Nico made the trade, and you got a lot of guys that, you know, have, have, have now gotten the opportunity to win, so they go out and play hard, and they do what's asked of them.

They don't ask for shots, they don't ask for plays, they just go out and play hard, rebound.

And the good thing about Luka and Kyrie, when you work hard, they will let you eat.

You know how I knew Dallas was going to win this game?

You know how I knew?

You only bought one suit?

You know who I knew?

How?

How I knew?

God told me.

God sham God.

God sham God.

Before the game, I saw him on the floor.

He's just about to do his daily work with Kyrie, and I said, you know, if this series

No, and he just stopped.

It ain't going back.

And he was right.

Get up.

Yeah, man.

Shout out to the Mavs, man.

This was a, this was beautiful.

Like, this was like championship level basketball.

Yeah.

They're like, no, we're not going to let them try to steal it down the stretch like they did the last game.

This game was over five, 10 minutes into the second quarter.

Without question.