CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors will take the court against one another for the 18th time in the last 24 months, this time on Christmas Day.
The rivalry between the two best teams in the league is authentic and perhaps the NBA’s best since the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers glory days of the 1980s.
Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue is well-versed in both of those historic rivalries. He played for the Lakers and coached for the Celtics. Lue said if the Cleveland and Golden State meet again next June, they will be on the level of those great franchises.
“It’s a lot of championships won in that era,” Lue said. “But if both teams stay together and both teams continue to keep winning, it could be like that. They have a great team over there on the other side and we have a great team also. When you talk basketball, you’re going to talk Golden State, Cleveland, San Antonio. And it’s a great place to be in.”
A Cavaliers-Warriors “three-quel” would make NBA history since no two teams have ever met for an NBA championship three years in a row. Not even the great Celtics-Lakers rivalry of the 1960s, when they met six times in eight years, could boast doing it three in a row.
Regardless of how many times they meet, the series hasn’t been fatigued. Cleveland-Golden State games are ratings gold for television executives and the addition of Kevin Durant will only fuel that. Much like the Magic-Bird days of the ’80s, this rivalry now features the game’s top three players in LeBron James, Steph Curry and Durant.
“We feel a little more comfortable going into this matchup with Kevin Durant on our team,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “It’s been a great rivalry the last couple of years. LeBron is so good, so big, so strong, so smart. He’s a phenomenal player and it’s nice to be able to go back there with Kevin. Obviously, they’ll guard each other quite a bit but we’ve got a lot of other guys we have to worry about, just as they have to worry about a lot of our guys. It still comes down to how you play as a team at both ends.”
Durant’s addition will prohibit the Cavalirs from cross-matching much defensively. James guarded Draymond Green at various intervals of last season’s Finals, including the critical Game 7, but Lue acknowledged he won’t be able to do that as much because of Durant’s presence. It doesn’t make much sense, Lue conceded, for Tristan Thompson to defend Durant.
“They’re already the toughest team to guard that I’ve played against, along with the Spurs, in my career,” James said. “So can you get more tougher to guard? I mean, I guess so when you add Kevin Durant, one of the greatest scorers this game has ever seen and one of the best players our game has seen in the last eight, nine, 10 years.”
While the Warriors will be at full strength since Green rejoined the team Friday following the birth of his son, the Cavaliers will be without guard J.R. Smith, who will miss most of the rest of the regular season with a fractured right thumb.
But if last season’s Warriors sweep during the regular season taught NBA fans anything, it’s how little the regular season impacts what happens in June. That’s why none of the players are getting too caught up on Sunday’s results.
“Everyone gets so crazy with the penmanship and the coverage of a Christmas Day game, and then the next day you’ve got to play again and it’s over,” James said. “I get excited for the game, but I don’t really care too much about storylines on Christmas. It’s not a big thing for me.”