Cavaliers are steamrolling towards the Finals
The NBA playoffs are here. The games are tighter, the lights are brighter, and the narratives are getting thick. It can be a lot to keep up with but don’t worry we’re here to help. Throughout the NBA postseason, FanSided will be gathering together some of the most talented writers from our network for a daily recap of our favorite stories from the night before.
Welcome to The Rotation.
My inevitability sense is tingling
Ian Levy | @HickoryHigh | FanSided
Having grown up in the Michael Jordan era, my radar for inevitability is fairly well calibrated. For me, that was the defining experience of watching Jordan play basketball, knowing that the action of every game, regardless of how it appeared to be playing out, was leading to a Chicago Bulls win. It can be a stressful experience if you have any sort of emotional investment in any other outcome.
If you, let’s say, were enamored with the swagger of Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton and wanted to see it validated. Or if you felt that the body of work of Karl Malone and John Stockton deserved a chance to win it all just once. Or if you were an Indiana Pacers fan (it me).
I had my hopes dashed often enough by Jordan that I have learned to put up some emotional walls. When Kobe, Shaq and their Lakers rose to prominence I knew better than to open too much of my heart to the Sacramento Kings, or to get too wrapped up in Indiana’s first NBA Finals. I could see what was coming, smell the hopelessness in the air.
I have never really had the same feeling with LeBron James. His first collection of Cleveland teams were always good but never projected an aura of inevitability. They always had questions marks. Roster holes. Places where they leaned too heavily on certain aspects of LeBron’s skill set, basically asked him to be everything and to do it perfectly. The one exception was getting blinded by the aggregated talent in his first season in Miami, but that was undone fairly quickly and dramatically in the Finals.
The Cavaliers are giving me a feeling I haven’t gotten from LeBron in a long time — my inevitability sense is tingling.
Since the 8:29 mark in the second quarter of Game 1, the Cavaliers projected win probability (according to Inpredictable) never dropped below 80 percent. In Game 2, it was above 80 percent from the opening tip until the final buzzer. FiveThirtyEight projects the Cavaliers as favorites in both of the next two games, in Cleveland, and gives them a 92 percent chance of advancing to the Finals. Those are just numbers, the aesthetics are much are stronger.
The Cavaliers look unbeatable, even in this reality that includes the Golden State Warriors. LeBron James is as good as he’s ever been, and as supported as he’s ever been — both by a roster loaded with talent and a system that is near-flawlessly elevating that talent. They have won 10 straight games and with a sweep of Toronto would set the NBA record for consecutive wins in a single playoffs.
As good as Toronto has been this year, its cause seems hopeless. As far as the Finals, the Cavaliers are only adding more and more gravitas to their case as favorites over whoever comes out of the Western Conference.
These Cleveland Cavaliers are the strongest LeBron James team yet
Ben Gibson | @CowboyOnPatrol | 8 Points, 9 Seconds, Hoops Habit
If I were picking entrance music for the upcoming heavyweight battle between the Cleveland Cavaliers and whomever comes out of the Western Conference, I’d go with Kanye West’s “Stronger” from his album Graduation. Much like the beat of the song, the Cavaliers steady, nearly mechanical march of through the playoff hammers along with very few signs of slowing. They have won the first two games against the Toronto Raptors and the question now is if it will be a sweep or gentleman’s sweep.
In what looks to be a sixth-straight NBA Finals appearance, it is easy to see this is the best team LeBron’s competed for a title with. Compared to the previous teams, this team is deeper and only getting better. As the words to the song go, this is a harder, better, faster, and stronger team than LeBron has ever had.
In his four Finals runs with the Heat, the team had issues the first year, and while the next three solved many of those issues, the aging of Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh pointed to a team in decline instead of a team on the rise. Last year Cleveland was missing two of its best three players going into Game 2 of the Finals. Barring mishap, it doesn’t look like it will be the case when LeBron goes into the Finals this year.
Let’s start with his two top teammates, the key to both this current squad’s success as well as LeBron’s Miami Heat teams, in particular his final season in 2013-14.
Unlike Wade in previous seasons, there hasn’t been the need to rest Kyrie Irving or worry about him getting tired. As good as Wade was and continues to be, that wasn’t helping the Heat be a better team as much as it was a tactical choice to save what he could give Miami until the playoffs.
It helps that Kyrie can spread the floor with his shooting. Wade’s lack of a three-point shot was one of the few weaknesses in his game. Irving hasn’t reached his peak nor has he equaled Wade’s, but considering the place Irving in his career compared to when Wade and James were together, Irving has the edge.
Cleveland isn’t having to force feed the ball to Kevin Love to get him his touches in the playoffs, He’s averaging 18.4 points a game and never looking out of sync with his teammates. Love found his spot as the third wheel better than Bosh did with Wade and James. Looking at Love’s Box Plus-Minus and Value Over Replacement Player numbers on Basketball-Reference, he’s had a slight edge over Bosh in LeBron’s last two seasons in Miami.
Love knocks down more three-pointers than Bosh did, stretching the floor in a way the Heat hoped to, but never fully realized in the way we see with the Cavaliers now. If anything, their raw stats are relatively equal, so at worst they are equal in comparison to each other.
It helps too that LeBron, perhaps for the first time in his career, isn’t carrying the load in the playoff, or at least as heavy of one. Irving is eighth in scoring in the playoffs with 24.8 points a game, ahead of LeBron’s 23.5. In the Conference Finals, he’s third with 26.5 (ahead of LeBron’s 23.5). In the previous two postseasons, LeBron was averaging 27 points or more to lead his team. You can’t really say LeBron can relax, but he’s not redlining the engine to keep his team alive.
Even when you extend the scope out to the fourth best player, in comparison to Ray Allen’s last season in Miami and J.R. Smith now, Smith is killing Allen, making 48.8 percent from beyond the arc compared to Ray’s 38.8 percent. J.R is taking and making more three-pointers than Allen did, playing a bigger role than just a shooting specialist.
We could go further, but let’s not dilute the message: This is the best team LeBron has been on, and this particular Cavaliers squad looks nothing like the out-of-sync mess they were earlier this year.
Of course, this only adds to the pressure for LeBron to succeed. As long as injuries don’t take away a key piece for Cleveland, this team is stacked more than any of the Miami team’s LeBron had.
It may not be fair that this team may face the best regular season team ever in the Golden State Warriors, but this is the most complete team James has taken into the NBA Finals.
Assuming they don’t choke away the series to the Toronto Raptors, of course
To Valhalla
Nathan Heck | @NathanHeck22 | Pelican Debrief
I wanted to write about how the Toronto Raptors, a team lacking a true top-10 player in the league, became a triumphant sum of their parts and dismantled the star-studded Cleveland Cavaliers.
I wanted to write about how the odds and ends that comprise Toronto’s roster rose above, both on the floor and in a moral sense, the championship-chasing collection of veterans Dan Gilbert has agreed to pay an unprecedented combined salary. I wanted to write about how DeMar DeRozan or Kyle Lowry arrived as a truly devastating force on the NBA’s largest stage.
Instead, I get to write about more of the same.
A Lebron-led team, once again, will coast to the NBA Finals after easily dispatching all of their Eastern Conference rivals. The Cleveland Cavaliers. The Miami Heat. It doesn’t really matter. LeBron’s presence in the Finals has become something so routine that it will be over half a decade since “The King” did not find himself participating in the NBA’s penultimate competition.
For some reason, though, this one seems exceptionally painful.
Maybe it is the affinity I have for the underdog, the team built from the ground up over the team built via the bank account, that left such a sour taste in my mouth as I watched the Raptors get relentlessly beat in every aspect of Game 2. Toronto seemingly put it all out there, trying to pull out an unlikely victory, and the talent of Cleveland simply overwhelmed them.
It’s a shame that such a charming team is going to be ruthlessly and carelessly tossed aside in such fashion. Sure, they don’t move the ball with the pizzaz the Golden State Warriors do, but there is something endearing about their isolation heavy offense that relies on mid-range jump shots. Perhaps it’s nostalgia that draws me to the seemingly backwards team, but my money is on the allure of a team that dares to zig when everyone else zags, even if it does not always work as planned.
The Toronto Raptors get to bring the series home after getting demolished twice in Cleveland. Home, the Air Canada Center, the temple of the team’s rabid fans and the site of constant dogmatic chants of “We the North.”
In another series against another adversary, that would mean something, but Lebron and his colleagues will likely continue to beat the Raptors in anticlimactic fashion regardless of where the game is played. There is nothing the screaming of the fans, the sweat of the players, or the platitudes preached from Dwane Casey’s pulpit can do about it.
With the curtain closing on the Raptor’s season and roster/coaching changes possibly heading their way, it seems this series has a certain sense of finality to it. What once was a promising franchise on the rise showed us that it has reached its ceiling, and that is nowhere near the level of LeBron James’s Cavaliers. Instead of raising this team up, it’s time to put them on the pyre.