It has been a well documented 52 years since the city of Cleveland celebrated a championship won by one of its major professional sports teams.
For the third time since 2007, LeBron James leads the Cleveland Cavaliers into the NBA Finals as the central figure behind ending the city’s agonizing failures. The journey begins tonight (Thursday) in Oakland versus the Golden State Warriors, who defeated the Cavaliers 4-2 in last season’s Finals.
The Cavaliers held the best record in the Eastern Conference this season at 57-25. Despite finishing only one game ahead of the 56-26 Toronto Raptors for the top mark in the East, the wide gap between the Cavaliers and all the other teams in the conference was unmistakable.
In their three playoff series in the run-up to the Finals, the Cavaliers were a combined 12-2 against the Detroit Pistons, Atlanta Hawks and Raptors, including 10 straight wins to begin the postseason. Their dominance was undeniable, beating down inferior opponents as good teams should.
Yet it was also a mirage, their evident defensive weaknesses concealed by a level of pure talent the Pistons, Hawks and Raptors were incapable of countering. Now the Cavaliers enter a completely different realm in facing the Warriors. It’s immaterial that the Cavaliers lost both of their meetings with the Warriors during the regular season.
Their 89-83 defeat on Christmas Day and 132-98 embarrassment on Jan. 18 are merely reflective of where both teams were in their evolution at those junctures of the season. The Cavaliers have become a much better team simply because James’ physical greatness and leadership elevated them to new heights.
The narrative that the firing of former head coach Dave Blatt and the ascension of his erstwhile assistant, Tyronn Lue, as Blatt’s replacement was the primary factor in the Cavs’ transformation makes for a nice storyline but is patently misleading.
The change truly occurred because of James’ understanding of how to motivate and mold Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, the team’s secondary stars. Yet all of James’ tough nurturing and brotherly encouragement did not magically turn Irving and Love, both wonderfully gifted offensive players, into strong defenders. In fact, both are extreme liabilities on the defensive end of the court, which the Warriors will exploit.
Over the course of this best-of-seven series, it is difficult to envision a Cavaliers team with so many defensive holes defeating the Warriors for four games. Led by the remarkable Stephen Curry, the Warriors, who hold home court advantage against the Cavaliers, won an NBA record 73 games in the regular season and have amazingly lost only twice—once in the playoffs—in Oracle Arena.
Curry has deservedly won the last two NBA MVP awards, but James is basketball’s preeminent player. Still, as the Warriors showed in their epic 4-3 series win over the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, the better team almost always wins a seven-game series. Warriors 4-2 over the Cavaliers.
