2006-07 NBA G League Finals

Result

Dakota won the last of the single-game-Finals era 129-121 in overtime, the second of two overtime championship games in this format's four-year run.

Games

Finals context

The 2006-07 season brought the curtain down on the D-League's brief experiment with a single winner-take-all championship game, and it did so with the format's signature moment: an overtime classic between the Dakota Wizards and the Colorado 14ers that produced the highest-scoring Finals of the era, Dakota winning 129-121 in extra time on April 29. Dakota, which had finished atop the Eastern Division at 33-17, was coached by Dave Joerger, a rising coaching prospect who had already won an IBA championship with the same Dakota organization in 2001 and two CBA titles with it in 2002 and 2004 -- meaning this D-League crown was actually his third professional title with the same Bismarck-based franchise across three different minor leagues, a remarkable run of continuity for one coach and one city through multiple league mergers and rebrands. The game turned on a signature individual performance: forward Darius Rice, coming off Dakota's bench, scored 52 points on 18-of-29 shooting, including 11 three-pointers on 19 attempts, both of which stand as D-League championship-game records that have never been broken. Rice's biggest shot came with 4.5 seconds left in regulation, a three-pointer that tied the score and forced overtime, where Dakota pulled away behind his continued scoring, plus 12 points, 7 rebounds, and 6 blocks from Rod Benson and stout perimeter defense from Renaldo Major and Chris McCray down the stretch. For Colorado, rookie point guard Pooh Jeter was the story of an otherwise short playoff run, averaging a staggering 25.7 points and 8.3 assists across the 14ers' three postseason games, doing so despite the team having already lost key contributors Louis Amundson and Von Wafer to NBA call-ups during the season -- an increasingly common storyline as the D-League matured into a genuine pipeline that could see its best players plucked away mid-playoff-run. No Finals MVP award existed yet, so Rice's record-setting night went unrecognized by any formal individual honor at the time, even though his 52-point outburst remains, to this day, the standard against which every subsequent championship-game scoring performance in league history is measured. The overtime finish also gave the single-game Finals format, used continuously from 2003-04 through this season, a fittingly dramatic sendoff: two of its four championship games (2003-04 and this one) went to overtime, and the following season the league would revert permanently to a best-of-three series, the format used, with only one interruption during the COVID-affected 2020-21 bubble season, for essentially the rest of the period covered by this file. Joerger would go on to a long NBA coaching career, eventually reaching the Memphis Grizzlies and Sacramento Kings as head coach, with this Dakota title an early data point in that trajectory.

Sources

• APBR.org — History of the National Basketball Developmental League
• Wikipedia — List of NBA G League champions
• DraftExpress — Rice Plays Big as Wizards Take Down 14ers in Overtime
• Wikipedia — Dakota Wizards
• Wikipedia — Darius Rice