San Francisco—The NBA can’t avoid the accusation that it’s obsessed with star power. It’s a star-driven league, and people will believe anything. Whole seasons are thought to be tilted to by unseen hands to guarantee that the best players on the best teams get every advantage possible.
Spend five minutes talking with any Canadian basketball fan and chances are that at some point they’ll argue that the reason the Toronto Raptors fell to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Conference Finals was because ‘the league’ wanted a LeBron James-Steph Curry re-match in the NBA Finals. No doubt there are swaths of fans in Oklahoma City who believe the Golden State Warriors were given the kid-glove treatment in the West—look no further than the controversy over Draymond Green’s non-suspension for hoofing Thunder centre Steven Adams in the tenders.
That the Raptors were ‘allowed’ to beat the high-profile Miami Heat in a Game 7 and then lost four games to the Cavs by an average of 28 points should dampen the argument, as should the way the Thunder shifted into their traditional meltdown mode in Game 6. Still, people believe want they want to believe.
But then the Finals roll around and—no matter how rational you try to be about these things—you can’t help but think: If the NBA did plot things to work out this way, it was absolutely worth it.
Has there been a more anticipated Finals match-up in recent memory than Cavs-Warriors 2.0?
Even though there have been some compelling Finals of late—rematches between the Heat and the Spurs or the Lakers and Celtics, as examples—this is the deepest treasure trove of storylines since the classic Celtics-Lakers Finals in the ’80s, widely considered the NBA’s Golden Age, where Larry Bird and Magic Johnson saved the league and set Michael Jordan up to help it explode.
Well, maybe this is the league’s new Golden Age, with Cavs-Warriors 2.0 the new gold standard.
The defending champion Warriors made history at every turn this season while playing a wildly entertaining brand of basketball led by Curry, who is redefining what the sport’s greatest player can look like, as his pure skill trumps the advantages of size and athleticism that have always kicked off conversations about the game’s best.
And then you have James, the biggest, strongest and most athletic of them all—for the moment the greatest player of his era and, at 31, still striving to carve out a spot alongside Michael, Magic and Kareem on basketball’s Mount Rushmore and carry Cleveland to its first championship of any kind in 52 years.
There is rivalry, there is history and there are two of basketball’s biggest celebrities vying for supremacy in the sport.
As an added bonus, the series may also turn out to be a glimpse into basketball’s test tube. When the three-point line was introduced for the 1979-80 season, the Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers combined to make one three—for the entire six-game Finals. Even though the math behind the three pointer is quite simple—shooting 33 percent from three produces the same number of points as shooting 50 percent from two—it took nearly three decades for organizations to embrace it the way Golden State and now Cleveland have.
The Warriors set an NBA record for threes made, while averaging 31.6 attempts per game. The Cavaliers lead the playoffs with 33.2 threes taken per game and are making 43.4 percent of them—higher than the Warriors’ 41.6 percent regular-season average. Cleveland has already set the NBA’s post-season record for threes made in a game, making 25 against the Atlanta Hawks in round two.
The Cavaliers were favourites to win the East before adding sweet-shooting journeyman centre Channing Frye at the trade deadline. With Frye integrated into the second unit Cleveland can play LeBron James like a super-sized, uber-athletic Magic Johnson, surrounded by four elite shooters that command the defence’s respect on the perimeter, giving James nearly unfettered access to the paint, which is why he’s shooting a comfy 54.6 percent from the field in the playoffs.
As every Toronto Raptors fan knows, the Cavs lost only two games on their way to their rematch with Golden State. Their 12-2 record and plus-16 net rating over three quality opponents translates into 70 wins over 82 games and is better than the plus-11.6 net rating the Warriors recorded during their record-breaking regular season.
The Cavaliers have the third-best net rating among teams heading into the NBA Finals since 1984, trailing only the 2001 Lakers (plus-20) and the 1996 Bulls (plus-17.5). According to ESPN.com’s Kevin Pelton, every team that has entered the Finals with a net rating of plus-14.5 or better has won the championship.
The Cavs’ decision to embrace high-volume three-point shooting has transformed them from good to great. And the Warriors know everything about that.
Is two teams combining to take 80 threes in a game good for basketball? Is the game leaving it’s back-to-the-basket roots too far behind?
Those are the kind of questions that may come out of the Finals, which will only serve to make it more noteworthy, more of a defining moment, a tipping point.
Meanwhile, the Warriors are a budding dynasty no one is quite ready to believe in yet. There are corners where their success is still written off as fluky or gimmicky. They don’t play with the scowl most associate with greatness.
But they are battle-tested. When you go 73-9, there is only so much adversity you can possibly deal with, but the post-season has tried them in ways nearly unheard of for a defending champion. Curry missed time with a sprained ankle and then with a sprained knee. Only 10 teams in league history have rallied from a 3-1 deficit the way the Warriors did against Oklahoma City Thunder, who are beginning to have the look of the old Utah Jazz—a lineup built around two first-ballot Hall-of-Famers that kept running into historic teams at the wrong time. Having survived those scares, questioning the Warriors’ worthiness only risks the asker’s credibility.
Having James’s Cavs and Curry’s Warriors meet in the Finals for the second straight year, this time with James bolstered by a deep and healthy supporting cast and with the Warriors trying to complete what might go down as the greatest single 12-month cycle in sports history—consecutive championships bookending a record-setting regular season, garnished with some historical playoff performances—boasts the kind of circumstances that come along every other generation, if that.
And yet there are those that will try to argue otherwise. Nostalgia is powerful. If what once was is eclipsed, it’s hard not to feel like you matter a little less. That’s how to makes sense of Charles Barkley trying to tell the world that he’s “never seen the NBA this bad” or legendary player and grump Oscar Robertson saying that Curry’s success is due to poor defence in the game today or even members of the old Chicago Bulls arguing that their gang would whup the Warriors in four.
Don’t listen to them. Don’t let their faulty memories and unwillingness to see what is right in front of them cloud your judgement. This is a special moment for the NBA and basketball, as magical as anything authored by Russell and Chamberlain or Bird and Magic or Michael and his Bulls.
Was the fix in? The NBA will never shake that line of thinking. But in this case you could understand the temptation. Cavaliers-Warriors represents the perfect meshing of analytics, celebrity and talent. It all combines to create an ideal basketball algorithm that spells out fun.
