Heat vs. Pacers Final Score: Miami Advances to NBA Finals After Blowout Win over Indiana
By Josh Hill
There are anticlimactic events in life and then there was Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat. What started as one of the most anticipated days in recent sports memory, quickly turned into a bloodbath and a boring one at that. While everything in this series leading up to this point suggested that we were in for a bitter battle to the end, the Indiana Pacers rolled over and couldn’t buy themselves a bucket down the stretch of the game and ended up getting blown out by Miami to end their season.
Indiana put up an admirable fight throughout the first six games of the series and we didn’t have a Game 7 solely off of dumb luck, even if the seventh game suggested that. Paul George, Roy Hibbert and David West were looking like they could overpower Miami’s iconic Big 3, but they went completely silent in Game 7.
George, Hibbert and West combined for under 50 points as a trio in Game 7 which is one of the main reasons the Pacers are going home after Monday night. Chris Bosh was his usual stinky self in Game 7 but he was balanced by a solid performance by Dwyane Wade and an even better one from LeBron James.
Some thought that LeBron James alone would not be able to carry this Heat team against the Pacers but that’s exactly what happened. James led the team in scoring but as a unit the Heat out rebounded the Pacers and used nearly twice the amount of free throws Indiana took to silence any notion of a Game 7 upset.
It was an anticlimactic finish to the fullest extent as Indiana showed minor flashes of wanting to comeback in the fourth quarter but they just had fallen too far behind the Heat. But Pacers fans shouldn’t hang their heads too low after this loss. Sure they lost out a game short of making an NBA Finals trip but they took the best team in the NBA to the brink and made the entire sports world question the superiority of the Miami Heat. People were already gearing up their this is the end of the Big 3 era rants before this game and that has everything to do with the way the Pacers played this entire series.
Don’t think we’ve seen the last of this Pacers team because we most certaintly haven’t.
But once again the talk is about the Heat making it back to the NBA Finals where they’ll attempt to win their second straight NBA title. But after this series with the Pacers, people are going right back to questioning if the Heat can match up against the San Antonio Spurs. The NBA Finals are set and they’re bound to be more exciting that the Game 7 we had to endure rather than enjoy.
The Miami Heat may have gotten their confidence back in Game 7 but the other six games in the series will have people questioning if they can really win a second title or is the Spurs will take them to task like the Indiana Pacers were able to.