Charting the scoring explosions of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving
By Ian Levy
Facing elimination, LeBron James and Kyrie Irving both had a performance for the ages, bring the NBA Finals back to Cleveland for Game 6.
The Cleveland Cavaliers season was all but over — down 3-1 and playing for their season on the road against a Golden State Warriors team that had mostly had their way with Cleveland. Then the news came down that Draymond Green — one of the best defensive players in the league — would be held out of Game 5 after an upgraded Flagrant Foul committed against LeBron James pushed him over the threshold for an automatic suspension.
The Cavaliers have struggled to get their offense running smoothly and Green had been a big part of the disruption. With his defensive prowess removed from the equation, an opportunity presented itself for Cleveland’s offense to break through. And, boy did they ever.
In Game 5, James and Kyrie Irving each scored 41 points. Their combined stat line was an eye-popping 82 points, 19 rebounds, 13 assists, 5 steals, and 4 blocks, with just 6 turnovers. Together they shot 33-of-54 (61.1 percent) from the field and 9-of-15 (60 percent) on three-pointers. This pair was nearly the entirety of Cleveland’s offense.
The graph below charts every basket and free throw made by the Cavaliers in Game 5. Points scored by LeBron are in red, Kyrie in orange.
Irving and James combined to score 76 percent of Cleveland’s points in the second half, including 17 of the team’s 19 fourth quarter points. All told, they scored or assisted on 97 of Cleveland’s 112 points. The Warriors, of course, only managed 97 points as a team.
The sheer volume of their scoring, along with the absurd efficiency and the other accumulated statistical flotsam place both of these among the best NBA Finals performances of all time. Game Score is a box score based metric, meant to roll all of a player’s single game statistics into one comparative measure. Since 1983-84, there have been just 48 NBA Finals performances with a Game Score above 30. What James and Irving did in Game rank as the second- and 22nd-best, respectively, among that group.
Although they are not the highest-scorers in this sample, efficiency and the other assorted contributions are what push LeBron and Kyrie into historic territory.
The good news for Cleveland is that the series has been extended and they get a chance to win force a Game 7 by winning again in their own building. The bad news is that it took the absence of Green and two of the greatest performances in Finals history to get them there — which is probably not a sustainable recipe for success.
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