Lichtenstein: Warriors Only Have Themselves To Blame For Failure To Close Out Cavs
By Steve Lichtenstein
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Sports can be funny. The best team doesn't always win in the end.
It's the team that plays the best at a particular time that hoists the championship trophy.
The NBA Finals were a case in point. The Warriors were the better team — deeper and more cohesive. Their record-setting 73-9 regular season was no aberration. They led the league in offensive efficiency and placed sixth defensively. Point guard Stephen Curry was the unanimous league MVP.
However, thanks to the singular talents of Finals MVP LeBron James, it will be the Cavaliers who will be fitted for rings after their thrilling 93-89 road victory in Game 7 on Sunday night.
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The Cavs looked like a collection of solo artists who formed a supergroup. The attack plan for the series seemed to consist of James and point guard Kyrie Irving taking turns to go one-on-one. Their bench production barely registered.
Yet they were deserving winners.
My two sons will live a long life insisting that the process to determine the 2015-16 champion was rigged, and they can make a circumstantial argument. They can submit as evidence the questionable postgame four-flagrant-foul designation on the Warriors' irreplaceable forward, Draymond Green, that led to a one-game suspension for accumulated points that turned the series around, the odd ticky-tack fouls called on Curry in Game 6, and all the unwhistled extra steps James routinely took on his forays to the basket. All so the league office, in cahoots with TV execs, could promote their Believe-Land storyline.
The Warriors, however, were solely to blame for blowing multiple opportunities to close the series out after taking a 3-1 lead.
Especially on Sunday night, when the title came down to the last five minutes of spine-tingling basketball.
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The Warriors, so prodigious offensively all season, couldn't put the ball through the hoop when it most counted. After Klay Thompson's layup tied the game at 89-89, Golden State went 0-for-9 from the floor over the final 4:39.
The Cavs were only marginally better, but Irving's off-the-dribble, above-the-break 3-pointer — a bad choice for the vast majority of pros — with 53 seconds remaining was all they needed.
James may have missed his last four field goal attempts, but he contributed in other ways down the stretch. He ran down Andre Iguodala to make an other-worldly block of his seemingly uncontested layup with 1:50 remaining. He grabbed a pair of huge defensive rebounds, including Curry's potential game-tying 3-pointer with 30 seconds left. And 20 seconds later, he iced the game by knocking down a free throw after he appeared to injure his right wrist on the fall from a hard Green foul.
James posted the third Game 7 triple-double in league history and led all players in total points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks in the series. Sure, he was ably abetted by Irving's phenomenal ball handling and shot-making, but there was no denying who was in charge.
James set the pace, called out defensive switches, and, maybe most importantly, he was the leader off the court. In his postgame remarks, he hinted that he was consulted when it came to the team's roster configuration. He will deny it, but James' fingerprints were all over the midseason firing of coach David Blatt in favor of Tyronn Lue.
On the other side, Curry was the main cog in perhaps the greatest ensemble we have ever witnessed. The pieces all fit in a near-perfect puzzle. We marveled at the Warriors' interchangeability on both ends of the floor.
Unfortunately, Curry's game had an unfamiliar feel during the series. All those bombs during the season that no one would believe had a chance of going in but did? Well, they stopped falling, making Curry look like Cavs gunner J.R. Smith.
There's a high probability that Curry was still suffering from the ankle and knee injuries he incurred during the Warriors' first-round series with Houston, but after Sunday's game Curry refused to use it as an excuse, putting to rest any notion that he will require surgery.
Besides, the beauty of the Warriors had been their free-flowing offense with multiple weapons. Everyone knows they were the best 3-point shooting team in the league this season (41.6 percent). But did you realize that they still would have topped the chart even if you subtracted Curry's record-setting 402 makes in 886 attempts?
As Curry mentioned afterward, Golden State devolved into a group of shot hunters Sunday in lieu of the beautiful ball movement that defined them all year.
Thompson, the owner of perhaps the sweetest stroke in the game, misfired on 15 of his 20 3-point attempts in the last two games. Forward Harrison Barnes, now a restricted free agent, made NBA GMs question his value after an underwhelming postseason. The Golden State bench, a bountiful bunch throughout the season, only mustered 16 points on 6-of-18 shooting from the field Sunday.
Only Green, who missed out on a triple-double by one assist Sunday, lived up to the moment.
It wasn't enough to counter the Cavs, the team that played the best when it mattered most.
For a FAN's perspective of the Nets, Jets and the NHL, follow Steve on Twitter @SteveLichtenst1
