OAKLAND — Draymond Green stood between LeBron James and Kevin Love. The trash-talking forward was dismantling the Cavaliers, in the midst of a 20-2 second quarter run. James was seething, staring at Love.
It was an impeccable metaphor for the 2016 NBA Finals: LeBron underestimating the tsunami that is the Golden State Warriors, carrying a flawed roster with him to the ultimate battlefield. Like Charles Barkley, Oscar Robertson, Doc Rivers — every umpteenth roaring Golden State cynic — LeBron had convinced himself the Warriors’ stay on top of the basketball mountain would be brief.
A mere 25 minutes after the Warriors choke-slammed the Cavaliers 110-77 in Game 2, LeBron slowly strolled into the press conference room.
Dressed in a black suit and a white tie, LeBron was attending a funeral.
The NBA Finals are over. He knows it. The Warriors know it. The basketball world knows it. James and his team need to pull off four of the next five games to win the title. Even if Matthew Dellavedova somehow morphs into Gary Payton overnight, again, it ain’t happening. The Cavaliers, and James specifically, have been exposed.
When asked if he needs play more selfishly for Cleveland to win a championship, James paused, sighed and slumped his shoulders. His body language said it all. It took two games to sink in, but the King now fully understands this Cleveland roster cannot topple the mighty Golden State Warriors.
“They just beat us at every — we didn’t win anything,” a flustered James said, cutting himself off.
After two games, the Cavaliers are quickly bleeding to death and there is no doctor, or King, that can save them. They can’t defend, they don’t communicate, they’ve stopped shooting threes with confidence and they’re exhausted. Ball movement is stagnant and isolation plays on offense is the only crutch they can lean on — worse, this is a roster James chose. Golden State could survive another Steph Curry injury and still wrap up in this series. The Splash Brothers have been side characters so far in the Finals. This has been a systematic take down of Cleveland. The Warriors salivate over this matchup.
“Their small lineup was a lot faster than what ours was,” a defeated coach Tyronn Lue said after the 33-point shellacking. “Being faster and being longer and athletic gave us some trouble.”
Some trouble?
This has been a pure and utter evisceration. Cleveland isn’t going back home with their tails between their legs; their tails have been bitten off by the ferocious Warriors. Curry and company may play a beautiful brand of basketball, but they’ll slice your heart out, one backdoor cut at a time. The Warriors have too many shooters, too many athletes and too much chemistry for the Cavaliers to handle.
And as intelligent as LeBron is, he should’ve known this was coming.
Prior to Game 2, LeBron gave his Cavalier teammates a gift: headphones. On the four hour and 50 minute plane ride back to Cleveland, he’ll wear these same headphones, reflecting on what went wrong. LeBron can point the finger directly at himself, and not for anything he’s done on the basketball court.
The King underestimated the dynasty the Warriors were forming and falsely believed a healthy Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving would be the right players to right last year’s wrongs in the Finals.
How else can he explain wanting to bring Love back for a second year? The two aren’t best buddies by any measure. If James was preparing for a rematch with Golden State, he had to have known Love was going to be a walking disaster on defense and that the Warriors were going to fast break him into the ground.
The Cavaliers don’t have two capable two-way players to handle Draymond and Andre Iguodala at the same time. At one time or another in this series, each of these players has gone off. This isn’t a David Blatt scheme problem — this is the wrong players on the wrong team. Iman Shumphert can’t play both ways, neither can J.R. Smith. Love certainly can’t.
The two stars, Love and James, famously met at a bikini-clad poolside in Los Angeles two months after losing the title to Golden State last year. They made amends after a rocky first year in Cleveland. James initially wasn’t welcoming to Love in the first place, sensing a lack of a competitiveness from the even-keeled Love. James should’ve trusted his gut instead of wanting to be the likable peacemaker. The problem with the King’s return to Cleveland is that he was dead set on restoring his likable image. It was a priority, just as much as he wanted to come home — and that’s been his major downfall this time around. Love can put his downtown apartment up for sale: he ain’t coming back and he never should’ve been back in 2015-16. That’s on LeBron.
The Cavaliers brought back Tristan Thompson at an absurd five-year, $82 million contract. Guess what? He can’t even touch the court when the Warriors bring in their small ball lineup. Richard Jefferson is playing out of necessity because he’s a smart enough player not to be a liability on defense. Richard Jefferson, a 35-year-old veteran on his last breath of NBA air.
Again, how can you justify paying that much for a gadget offensive rebounder, instead of some type of pieces that could better match up with the Warriors’ small ball lineup? Well, Thompson and James share an agent, Rich Paul. Again, LeBron is the sympathetic teammate instead of a basketball mastermind determined on conquering Curry and Golden State.
These are all decisions that, no doubt, LeBron green-lit. This is why the Cavs are all but assured to walk away from their second straight NBA Finals as the clear-cut loser, an inferior team that can’t keep up with Golden State. The Cavaliers are a fantastic team; they are nowhere close to being the best.
Was James like the rest of the NBA, and the league’s legends, that have scoffed at the Warriors’ success? Did he simply think he could use his power and strength to break Golden State? What moves should the Cavaliers have made instead? Start with better ones than Love and Thompson, clearly. Both flashed in the regular season; both are matchup liabilities against the Warriors.
At this point, answers to those questions don’t matter. The Cavaliers are two losses away from contemplating throwing a grenade at the roster.
To his credit, James and Cleveland GM David Griffin acquired Channing Frye in February, knowing they needed more shooting to compete with the Warriors. Frye has played 11 minutes and scored 2 points in the NBA Finals. The Warriors gobbled up the one favorable matchup Cleveland thought they had. Ouch.
Then there’s Kyrie Irving, a player LeBron gladly inherited at the time in 2014. But Irving, like Russell Westbrook, uses athleticism to mesmerize us and mask his flaws, like ball-hogging and ghostly defense. He’s 12/36 so far in this series with just 5 assists.
Are the Warriors surprised about the two lopsided wins over Cleveland? Some, like Curry and Steve Kerr gave the politically correct answer.
Some were honest.
“Not really,” Klay Thompson told reporters.
In hindsight, LeBron shouldn’t be surprised either. The Warriors are holding the most physically imposing player hostage in the NBA Finals, and he doesn’t have the teammates to rescue him.