The points, may they rain abundant in these NBA Finals.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have transformed since Tyronn Lue took the reigns from the fired David Blatt in January, and since the play-offs in particular LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love have looked like they have developed a true chemistry for the first time. Their ball-movement, their spacing, their three-point shooting during the Eastern Conference play-offs has all been, well, Warriors-esque. Dare we even say, better?
The Warriors are scoring 109.8 points per 100 possessions these play-offs. Their three-point percentage is 40.3, and their three-point attempts per contest are 30.9. Their assists per 100 possessions is 18.3.
In those figures, the hallmarks of the pace-and-space basketball that has won them 168 games the last two seasons (regular season and play-offs), Golden State rank second, third, third and tied for first, respectively. Tops in every category? The Cavaliers.
Those are just post-season figures, of course, and the Cavs have had a slightly easier run of opposition than the Warriors.
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But it illustrates that Lue’s brilliantly simple plan to stack the floor with three-point shooters like Irving, Love and JR Smith around LeBron, a drive-and-kick genius who fully commands the resulting court space from this tactic, is supercharging the Cavs.
Last year Cleveland ultimately could not defend Golden State quite well enough. This year, they may not have to.
It is, of course, impossible to say if that really will be Lue’s plan. To meet the champions on their own terms, to try and beat them at their own game by taking it just about to its logical extreme.
It doesn’t exactly come without its risks, but the most obvious one that would come to mind – sacrificing defence – mostly hasn’t happened. Tristan Thompson has done a magnificent job keeping patrol inside, and LeBron is capable of defending wide swathes of the court. JR Smith is a subtly strong wing defender, and so far Love and Irving have been passable enough. That five-man line-up has played a staggering 285 minutes together in the post-season, and it’s been devastatingly effective – 124.1 points per 100 possessions scored, just 102.7 per 100 allowed. Over the course of a full season that would make the 73-win Warriors look average.
But that’s against Atlanta, Toronto and Detroit. Atlanta and Toronto especially are good defensive clubs, and the way the Cavs hammered them shouldn’t be scoffed at. But Cleveland haven’t had to battle a team yet who can match up with them the way the Warriors can.
Wing defenders like Andre Iguodala and Klay Thompson stand a good chance to disrupt the effectiveness, if not of LeBron's drive-and-kick game, then of the finishing at the end of those sequences. Draymond Green might also be able to slow James down, and underrated defender Stephen Curry has shown he can initiate a lot of trouble in traffic.
If the Cavs can’t get their offence going, it’s hard to see them winning with defence. They can roll out something like a James-Dellavedova-Thompson-Iman Shumpert based line-up, they could try to dust off Timofey Mozgov, but none of that worked in the long run last year, and it’s even harder to imagine it working now after they’ve ignored it all play-offs.
And that’s really the key for the Warriors. Kevin Durant’s superman defensive act had them on the ropes a round ago, but LeBron isn’t quite a three-point-shooting confidence-shredder in that way. He’s a linebacker, keeping the team’s shape, covering for other’s weaknesses, denying entry into the middle. Not sticking his nightmare arms out across the entire three-point line and smothering the daylight.
Golden State should be able to get their points, at least if they don’t go through any poorly timed shooting slumps.
Which is possible. Iguodala is streaky in the best of times, as is Green (especially these play-offs). Harrison Barnes has been a ghost. If the Curry-Thompson spigot runs dry, it’s been pretty hard lately for the Warriors to juice offence out of other parts of the team. Green has done an admirable job running point forward and initiating offence here and there and they run some interesting mid-range sets through Shaun Livingston, but let’s be real – their bread and butter is Curry’s warping of lanes and space with his ball handling, initiating the team’s whirring passing scheme and threes going in. If they struggle to keep that machine humming (as they did throughout the OKC series) they are vulnerable.
That’s why Cleveland’s best bet is to just keep doing what they’ve been doing and focus on making Golden State outgun them. If they get supernova’d by Curry, there’s just not really going to be anything they can do about that. But there’s a very good chance over the course of seven games Golden State will be cold or out of sorts long enough for the offensive-minded Cavs to be better four times. They’ve definitely been good enough throughout the play-offs to prove that.
Ironically, if the Warriors can’t click into gear, they could consider trying to slow things down and muck it up in some games. They won three relatively ugly ones in a row against the Thunder, rattling them defensively and getting just enough of those fiery streaks to grit out a victory.
They won’t want to resort to that kind of game, but if they have to do it to win, they’ve shown they can.
Which might be their biggest advantage in these Finals. They have a few more functional identities than the Cavs, a bit more shapes they can take when the going gets tough.
Cleveland have reached this new level through unrelenting firepower, and they should try to break the Warriors under it. But they simply might not be able to.
Either Cleveland or Golden State can win this series on Plan As. But if it turns on Plan Bs, it’s harder to see the Cavs getting to four wins.
For that reason, it’s Warriors in 7.
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