Cleveland — If the Toronto Raptors weren’t playing against LeBron James, maybe they’d have a chance.
If they weren’t playing against this LeBron James, maybe they could convince themselves their upcoming (very likely) lost weekend in Cleveland wouldn’t be an exercise in futility.
But facts are facts.
James isn’t going anywhere and the Raptors are likely as good as gone: LeBron has never lost a series when his team has led 2-0, and Toronto has never comeback from an 0-2 hole.
Naturally, the Raptors can’t talk that way or, ideally, think that way. So in the build-up to Game 3 there were the necessary bold words.
"We got no choice, that is what we have to do. Win tonight, focus on tonight and then go from there," Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry said. "We got to go out and do whatever we need to do to win the game."
Can they do it without somehow slowing the L-Train?
[relatedlinks]
The Raptors had a brief window when the Cavaliers superstar was not in peak form. James described Game 1, when he shot just 12-of-30 from the field, including 1-of-8 from three and 1-of-6 from the free-throw line, as one of his worst games of the season.
He was being a little hard on himself, like Michelangelo griping he didn’t get the first draft of one of his engineering sketches just right. Shooting aside, James did manage to pull down 11 rebounds, distribute 13 assists and score a pair of buckets in the final 90 seconds to force overtime.
Worst game of the season? According to the catchall GameScore stat on Basketball-Reference, it wasn’t even close to being LeBron’s “worst” triple-double.
Whatever. James thought he played “badly” and was determined to make up for it, and the 43 points and 14 assists against just one turnover in Game 2 ended up as one of the five best playoff games of his career, which is saying something given Game 3 Saturday night in Cleveland will be post-season game No. 227.
Clearly the Raptors have a problem and it seems highly unlikely they will be able to fix it.
In 12 playoff games against Toronto, James is averaging 31 points, 8.6 rebounds and 7.3 assists on 58 per cent shooting.
[snippet id=3636937]
Where exactly James will finish on the list of the best players of all-time will likely come down to if he can figure out where he can win a couple more championships, Cleveland or elsewhere.
But it’s clear that at age 33 he’s still in his prime with no decline in sight. If LeBron retired next week, he’d likely be viewed as one of the top-three players ever with only Michael Jordan’s 6-0 mark in the NBA Finals and six Finals MVP awards, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s combination of six titles and six MVP awards as conceivable trump cards in those never-ending debates.
And even as Raptors head coach Dwane Casey was scheming in advance of Game 3 to figure out how to somehow make life harder for James, the King was giving credit to Casey for turning him into the monster who has ruled the Eastern Conference as he guns for his eighth-straight NBA Finals appearance.
The last time there were any doubts about James’ status was in 2011 when he lost the NBA Finals in six games to the Dallas Mavericks in his first Finals appearance with the Miami Heat.
Casey devised the Mavericks’ defensive game plan, and it worked. The Mavericks played a lot of zone, they encouraged James to take mid-range jumpers. Dallas pushed him to play a game he was uncomfortable with.
James was confused and it showed. Looking back in time, it’s almost as if No. 23 was replaced with an impostor as James averaged 17.8 points, 7.2 rebounds and 6.8 assists for the series.
His average GameScore was a relatively pedestrian (by his standards) 13.8 – or the same as C.J. McCollum had this past season for the Portland Trail Blazers. James shot 47.8 per cent from the floor and 32.1 per cent from three. He made 24 turnovers, but mostly he looked hesitant.
James took the moment to heart.
"I wasn’t that good of a player in that series. I wasn’t a complete basketball player. Dwane Casey drew up a game plan against me in that ‘11 series in the Finals when I played Dallas to take away things I was very good at and tried to make me do things I wasn’t very good at. So he’s part of the reason why I am who I am today."
[snippet id=3360195]
And now James seems immune to any and all schemes, much to Casey’s chagrin.
"He’s one of the best in reading those situations," Casey said earlier in the series. "…When he first came in the league, you could probably trick him a little bit but now you’re not going to show him anything he hasn’t seen before."
The most telling proof may be James’ performance in the six Finals appearances since Casey and the Mavericks were able to slow him down.
Against the NBA’s best teams with game plans designed specifically to thwart him, James has dominated, averaging 30.6 points, 11 rebounds and 7.7 assists on 48 per cent shooting with an average GameScore of 24.9 — or comparable to James Harden’s regular-season numbers in what is expected to be a near-unanimous MVP campaign.
James sees your game plan and he laughs at your game plan.
"I pretty much know the scouting report on me is going to be to dare me to shoot jump shots and keep me out of the paint, not allow me to go to the free-throw line," he said after casually dominating the Raptors in Game 2. "Over the course of my career, I just try to put a lot of work into other facets of my game to try to neutralize their game plan.
"I work extremely hard on my jump shot and in a few years after my first year in Miami, I started working on my post game in ways I could score in the post and be just very efficient," he said. "[The Raptors] kind of laid off me a lot and I was able to make some shots, some jump shots, and I felt good going into the stretch of the game."
Can the Raptors solve the James riddle in Game 3?
Their season likely depends on it. James being James, you can’t like their chances.
