DALLAS – Call it a rare coincidence if you must, but the Dallas Mavericks have now won games with buzzer-beaters on St. Patrick's Day in back-to-back seasons ... and both instances involved Kyrie Irving and Maxi Kleber.
Last season, with the Mavs trailing LeBron James' Los Angeles Lakers by two points, Irving passed the ball to Kleber for a last-second 3-point attempt that hit nothing but net, and Dallas pulled out the 111-110 win.
On Sunday afternoon, the Mavs found themselves tied at 105-105 with the defending-champion Denver Nuggets, and with 2.8 seconds remaining, it was Kleber who passed the ball in to Irving for the game-winning shot – one that made waves throughout the basketball world due to its high level of difficulty.
“It felt good," Irving said of his left-handed floater over Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic at the buzzer. "It’s a play that we work on during shootaround pretty often, so it felt good to execute. I had trust in my teammates out there and, in the end, being lucky enough to hit a left-hand floater. I looked at it after the game and I was pretty far out. Shots that I work on and just being ambidextrous and just trusting the skills that I work on.”
Whether it's just a fun coincidence or truly a "Luck of the Kai'rish" situation, maybe the Mavs should continue to put Irving and Kleber in some sort of actions together for game-winning attempts going forward ... just make sure it's not just a St. Patrick's Day thing.
"It was actually for, Maxi [Kleber] has two reads on both (of the final two) plays there, Luka [Doncic] and Kai (Kyrie Irving) ," Mavs head coach Jason Kidd said of the final play from Sunday's game. "Luka was open first on the first one. To be able to catch and shoot, to be able to execute -- we practiced this and to be able to run the same play and have Kai come off the baseline. We talked about it and ran it in Oklahoma City. Just to be able to execute and trust one another was big this afternoon."
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