After such a moment, the world runs on #HotTakes. Golden State: Biggest choke ever! LeBron James: Greatest player ever! The series just concluded: Best NBA finals ever! And here’s where we draw a deep breath and say, “None of the above.”
As a seven-round entity, these finals were tepid. Only Game 7 was decided by fewer than 11 points, and even it saw the best offensive teams in their respective conferences go from the 4:38 mark of the fourth quarter to 0:54 without a tiebreaking point. Maybe you’re saying, “Well, they were playing great defense” – and LeBron’s trackdown block of Andre Iguodala’s layup was terrific – but there was some bad offense as well. There were also nerves jangling.
That Golden State let a 3-1 finals lead slip was unprecedented. Still, this collapse must bear an asterisk: Draymond Green wasn’t allowed to play in Game 5. Say what you will about Cleveland’s “resilience,” but the series turned with his suspension. Maybe LeBron baited him. Maybe Green was simply silly. Whatever the cause, the effect was that his team was never the same.
The Warriors lost Game 5 at home and no-showed Game 6 in Cleveland. Over two sun-kissed seasons, they’d faced only one comparable test – Game 6 at Oklahoma City last month. There’s a reason teams seek to avoid elimination games: Anything can happen. The “anythings” that happened Sunday were that Kevin Love played a halfway decent game and that Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, who rarely go bad in tandem, went bad at the absolute wrong moment.
Even at that, Golden State made 15 treys to Cleveland’s six. That would have been enough had they gotten anything inside. They were outscored 48-28 in the lane. Without Andrew Bogut, Golden State’s interior defense was a mess. Force to work serious minutes, Festus Ezeli and Anderson Varejao proved incapable of making a layup. The Warriors won the finals by benching Bogut. They lost this time because he hurt his knee the same night Green couldn’t play. The team that loves to go small lost because it couldn’t play big.
Much has been made of this championship, hand-delivered to his Northern Ohio homeland, as being vital to LeBron’s “legacy.” Please. He was similarly superb in the finals last year. He just had more help. (Irving didn’t wreck his knee this time.) James remains as he was before Game 7 – among the five greatest players ever. To suggest that Ring No. 3 pushes him to the pinnacle ignores one simple truth: In six trips to the finals, Michael Jordan never played in a Game 7. Never needed one.
The fallout regarding Curry will be severe – apart from Game 4, he had a bad finals – but it doesn’t mean he’s undeserving of his two MVPs. Those are given for regular-season performance. Two years running, he was the best player on the best team. It will be instructive to see how the guy who’d become America’s Cutie Pie handles this backlash. Bandwagons roll thusly: Last on, first off. But I’d suggest we shouldn’t give up on the game’s greatest shooter just yet.
The team that lost nine regular-season games lost nine in the playoffs, the final three included, to finish title-less: That’s reality. Is that a choke? Maybe a little. But the Warriors didn’t lose to a No. 8 seed: They lost to the East’s No. 1 seed, a team with the best player of his generation. They let themselves get pushed into a win-or-else game and lost in the final minute. That doesn’t make them gutless – were that so, they’d have lost Game 6 in OKC – or bad people. It just made them second-best in a best-of-seven.
As for feeling happy for those long-suffering folks in Cleveland: Sorry, but you’re talking to the wrong guy. I live in Atlanta. Misery craves company. (And the Braves did beat the Indians in 1995.)
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