2005-06 NBA Finals

Result

Games

Finals MVP

Dwyane Wade. Wade won Finals MVP averaging 34.7 points per game, leading Miami's comeback from a 2-0 series deficit to capture the franchise's first championship.

Series context

The 2005-06 NBA Finals featured the Miami Heat, led by Dwyane Wade and a 34-year-old Shaquille O'Neal, against the Dallas Mavericks, led by Dirk Nowitzki and coached by Avery Johnson, in both franchises' quest for a first championship. Miami had acquired O'Neal from the Lakers in 2004 specifically to pair him with the young, ascendant Wade, while Dallas entered the Finals as one of the league's top regular-season teams behind Nowitzki's evolving superstar play and a deep, versatile roster that included Josh Howard and Jason Terry. Dallas took control early, winning Games 1 and 2 in Miami to grab a commanding 2-0 series lead, and it appeared the Mavericks were on their way to a relatively comfortable title. The series shifted to Dallas for Game 3, where the Heat rallied for a narrow win to get on the board. Miami then blew out the Mavericks in Game 4 to even the series. Game 5 turned into a controversial, foul-plagued affair in which Wade set an NBA Finals record with 21 made free throws (on 25 attempts) as Miami escaped with a 101-100 overtime win, taking a 3-2 series lead. The Heat closed out the championship on June 20 with a 95-92 win in Game 6, completing the comeback from an 0-2 deficit. Dwyane Wade was named Finals MVP after averaging 34.7 points per game across the six games, cementing his emergence as one of the league's premier young stars, while O'Neal provided a steadying veteran presence and interior scoring. The Heat became one of a small number of teams in NBA history to win a championship after trailing 0-2 in the Finals. For Dallas, the loss, compounded by controversy over the officiating in Game 5, began a period of postseason disappointment that would culminate years later in the franchise's eventual 2011 championship, ironically also over the Heat. This Finals marked Miami's first NBA championship in franchise history and represented a passing-of-the-torch moment, as it affirmed Wade's status as a top-tier superstar while giving O'Neal his fourth career title, spread across two different franchises. Dallas's collapse after the 2-0 start included a Game 4 fourth quarter in which the Mavericks scored just seven points, at the time the lowest fourth-quarter output by any team in Finals history, and Miami's three consecutive home wins in Games 3 through 5 made the Heat only the second team since 1985 to sweep the middle three games of a Finals at home. The series also produced the final in-game player suspension in Finals history until Draymond Green's in 2016, after Dallas forward Jerry Stackhouse was suspended for a flagrant foul. Notably, Dallas had actually won both regular-season meetings between the two teams that year, making the Finals result something of an upset on paper. The championship was also something of an outlier for the decade: it was the only Finals of the 2000s that featured neither the Los Angeles Lakers nor the San Antonio Spurs, and the first Finals since 1995 coached by neither Phil Jackson nor Gregg Popovich.

Sources

• Wikipedia - 2006 NBA Finals
• Basketball-Reference - 2006 NBA Finals