Walter Clayton Jr. needed 17 minutes and 10 seconds to give Dallas the kind of bench scoring that cannot be scheduled for later. He made 6 of 7 shots, went 2-for-2 from 3-point range and converted his only free throw for 15 points in Monday’s 113-109 victory over Miami.
The Mavericks were not waiting for a comfortable game to arrive. Miami led 84-83 after three quarters and had built a 12-point advantage earlier, forcing Dallas to keep finding offense while the game lurched between control and inconvenience. The Mavericks finished 43-for-94 from the field and made 14 3-pointers, respectable totals without much room for a second unit to disappear.
Clayton supplied a burst before the fourth quarter became the province of Dallas’ primary players.
At 8:27, with Miami ahead 93-90, Clayton made a layup to cut the deficit to one. Fourteen seconds later, he drove for another layup, drew a shooting foul on Bobby Portis and made the free throw. That three-point play put Dallas ahead 95-93.
The sequence required no elaborate scoring binge: two direct attacks and five points, with Flagg’s block interrupting a Miami possession between those baskets.
Clayton’s shooting line gives the stretch its proper scale. He scored 15 points on seven attempts, rather than consuming the kind of volume reserved for Cooper Flagg, Kyrie Irving or P.J. Washington.
His two 3-pointers came earlier in the game, including a 24-foot make with 3:42 left in the second quarter, but the fourth-quarter baskets mattered because they arrived when Dallas needed points from someone outside its headline trio.
He also made himself useful when the ball was in Miami’s hands. At 7:55, Clayton blocked Portis’ 3-foot layup, and Washington collected the rebound. Dallas did not convert the possession—Washington turned the ball over at 7:50—but the play prevented a clean Miami score immediately after the Heat had fallen behind.
A block does not automatically become a four-point swing; here, its value was the interruption, followed by a Dallas possession rather than a made basket.
The run was efficient, not immaculate. Davion Mitchell’s floater at 6:57 tied the score at 95, and his free throw at 6:34 moved Miami ahead 96-95. Clayton had thrown a bad pass for a turnover at 6:37, then committed his second foul at 6:34.
His third foul came at 5:50. Those errors did not erase the burst, but they kept it from becoming a tidy story about a reserve entering and solving everything in sight.
