Email from Jacques Magloire: Lakers are about to lo, this is the first time that Lebron had such a hungry person to guard.simply said at this point its magic over logic. Everybody on the Heat has to play their role and let lebron try to contain a hungry underrated player of the same age. Defending Anthony Davis is key and Spoelstra has his number.so sorry my friend, the series will be even tonight and Miami will get the championship. Going bold here, not only will Miami win tonight, they’ll win the series. Ironically they could be looking at the 2011 NBA Finals as a model. In that series, Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks managed an upset win over a heavily favored team led by LeBron James when they beat (oddly enough) the Miami Heat in six games. WNBA Finals When they scheduled the WNBA Finals games to work as sort of a lead on for the NBA Finals, they probably were hoping for something a little more dramatic than this. The Storm is now up 75-48 with the fourth quarter ready to begin. It’s all but over here. In these extraordinary times, the Guardian’s editorial independence has never been more important. Because no one sets our agenda, or edits our editor, we can keep delivering quality, trustworthy, fact-checked journalism each and every day. Free from commercial or political bias, we can report fearlessly on world events and challenge those in power. Your support protects the Guardian’s independence. We believe every one of us deserves equal access to accurate news and calm explanation. No matter how unpredictable the future feels, we will remain with you, delivering high quality news so we can all make critical decisions about our lives, health and security – based on fact, not fiction. Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you. Email from Ahmed Osman: No words can describe how much I wanted Miami to make a series out of this before game 3 and they did, it took everything going their way, but hey, they did it. Jimmy Butler showed he is a world class competitor and “Those other guys” chipped in with double digit scoring. I agree that everything had to go their way for that to happen but can we just take a minute to realise that the Lakers had it easy in game 3 (Miami missing their leading playoff scorer and arguably their second best player) yet still winning? Adebayo returning will be huge, especially with him matching up with Anthony Davies defensively. I have the heat winning this one and Tyler Hero having another crazy night in the bubble. We’ll see. The Heat now have a reason to believe that they win this series and, hey, it looks like Adebayo is officially available for Game 4. The question is: how effective will he be? Miami Heat rookie Tyler Herro, who has been getting clutch baskets throughout this postseason, was the one who provided the visual of Game 3 when the camera caught him giving a Sid Vicious-like snarl. Predictions Last time around I was extremely certain that the Miami Heat would lose Game 3. I had never been more confident about anything in my life. Well, sports-related at least. I turned out to be extremely wrong, which I was honestly happy about. The longer the series the better, in my opinion. (This feeling may or may not be due to the fact that I get paid per blog.) I still just can’t pick the Heat to win twice, not against a LeBron James with a chip on his shoulder. Anthony Davis is not going to score just 15 points in 33 minutes again and you can’t think the Lakers will continue to hand the Heat free possessions thanks to sloppy turnovers. The Heat might win another game in this series but it’s not going to be this one. Have a different read on the series? Feel free to send your predictions here either via email (to hunter.felt.freelance@theguardian.com or tweet @HunterFelt. Okay here’s the biggest news: Bam Adebayo is planning to play despite the neck sprain that caused him to miss Games 2 and 3. Meanwhile, Goran Dragic has been warming up to see if he can play through his foot injury. He’s listed as doubtful and I would be very surprised to see him playing in this game. Remember that even if Adebayo plays he’s probably not going to be 100%. Still, if they can get anything from him, the Heat’s odds of finding a way to even out this series 2-2 improve dramatically. WNBA Finals Just a reminder: there is another basketball game going on here. It’s currently halftime in the WNBA Finals. The Seattle Storm are up on the Las Vegas Aces 43-34. The Storm are already up 2-0 in the five game series, which means if they hold onto the lead then that’s it, they’re the 2019-20 season champions. The game’s on ESPN right now if you want to watch something other than the pregame. Preamble Do you believe in the concept of trap games? While there’s never really been any scientific consensus about their existence, they are accepted almost as a matter of faith in sports circles. Maybe that makes us somewhat superstitious, but we’ve just seen it too many times. If you’re not familiar with the term, it goes something like this: a heavily-favored team on a winning streak is scheduled to play against a weaker, possibly shorthanded, opponent and somehow they end up losing. Sometimes big. Maybe it’s just a matter of things that happen: no team is good enough to win every game and no team is bad enough to lose every game. Maybe. Sometimes, however, it does feel like a team becomes overconfident and it faces a team that rightly feels like they have nothing to lose. The results are... well the results are a lot like what we saw in Game 3 of the NBA Finals. The Los Angeles Lakers were up 2-0 over a Miami Heat team that was missing both Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic. The conversation before the game wasn’t whether the Heat could make a comeback, that seemed out of the question, it was whether it was worth even playing out the next two games. This was going to be a sweep. Without two out of their three most important starters, Miami had exactly one pathway to victory: their leader Jimmy Butler was going to have to have a monster game and the Lakers would have to make some mistakes. Well, both of those happened on Sunday. Butler put in one of the all-time greatest individual games in Finals history, taking advantage of a Lakers team that was committing an absurd number of unforced turnovers. The Lakers looked like they believed in the hype, the Heat out-everything’d them and, as a result, we might just have a series on our hands. Here’s the problem: it’s hard to count on both of those things happening in a second consecutive game. You can’t expect Butler to have a 40-point triple-double in his second consecutive game and everything we know about LeBron James tells us that he’s not going to let his team (and the Lakers are very much his team) off the hook after Sunday’s shockingly unfocused effort. In other words, Game 4 will not be a trap game, they know exactly how the Heat could beat them. If the Lakers win, well they go up 3-1 in the series and all the pressure is on Miami to win three straight games. It’s better than being down 3-0, but not by a whole lot. However, if the Heat can even this up… well we have one of the most unexpectedly competitive NBA Finals we’ve seen in a while. The stakes could not be higher. Have thoughts/comments/jokes/what-have-you’s? Send them in our direction and we’ll use them throughout this blog. You can send emails to hunter.felt.freelance@theguardian.com or Tweet @HunterFelt. It’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals featuring the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat at the Magic Kingdom. The game’s scheduled to start at 9pm EST, but we’ll be here well before that. Hunter will be here shortly, in the meantime here’s a look at Jimmy Butler’s performance in the series so far: Things looked plenty grim for the Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat entering Sunday night’s third game of the NBA finals. Even at full strength, the improbable Eastern Conference champions had gone off as longshots against a Los Angeles Lakers team fronted by two of the five best players in the world in LeBron James and Anthony Davis. But after losing their second- and third-best players to injuries and getting mostly overwhelmed in the first two games of the best-of-seven championship series, Miami were all but written off entirely. As Butler soberly assessed after Friday night’s Game 2 loss pushed the Heat to within two games of elimination: “We got to play damn near perfect in order to beat those guys.” On Sunday night, he took it upon himself to do just that.