GSW-CLE I: The experiment begins

When it comes to basketball, every playoff series is a hypothesis. We make a big deal out of the few, precious regular season match-ups between contenders, but they don’t really tell us anything. First of all, anything can happen for one game. Second, there’s a big difference between how coaches coach when facing X team on Wednesday and Y team on Thursday and when they have a week to sit down and plot how to play one team for two weeks.

So the hypothesis of the season has been, reasonably, that there were two superteams and everybody else. That has so far basically seemed to be true. Despite storylines a plenty about the Celtics or the Spurs or how well the Jazz matched up or whatever, basically nobody touched either the Cavaliers or Warriors on their way to each of their third straight NBA Finals. They went a combined 24-1. An anticlimactic season turned out, in this respect, to be exactly as anticlimactic as most people suspected.

But, after Game 1, the real question is — maybe there’s only one superteam? Not that the Cavaliers aren’t better than everyone else, but the Warriors might be way better still. It’s not like that would be an unreasonable outcome. The two teams were very evenly matched last year (the Warriors might well have had a slight edge) and then the Warriors added one of the two or three best players on the planet. Meanwhile, the Cavaliers, for all their dominance, scuffled a bit through the regular season. Second in the East is nothing to sneeze at, but 51 wins puts them in a tier with Utah, Toronto and the Clippers — very good, but not exactly superteam material. The 113-91 beatdown the Warriors gave the Cavaliers on Thursday (worse than it looked) makes sense of all that data.

Here, however, is where hypothesis comes in. After all, if blowouts told you everything you needed to know, it would have seemed like the Spurs were much worse than the Rockets after Game 1 of that series (a 99-126 blowout), and the Rockets much worse than the Spurs after Game 2 (121-96). Or, we can look at more immediately pertinent history: through four games of last year’s NBA Finals, the Warriors had blown out the Cavaliers twice (104-89, 110-77), and beaten them by 11 the other time (108-97). It makes sense that the Warriors with Kevin Durant would be way better than the Warriors without Kevin Durant but there are always — even for the Durantula — diminishing returns. Only one basketball. Other platitudes of that nature.

Next: How the length of Kevin Durant slowed down LeBron James

And so, right now, we have one data point in the progress of our experiment. The next comes on Sunday. The greatest player of all time takes on maybe the greatest team of all time. I wish it were today.