Dying as individuals: Cleveland’s meltdown

In retrospect, we probably should have known that a team dependent on JR Smith, Iman Shumpert, Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye had no chance in hell of toppling what might be the greatest team of all-time.

The LeBron James factor is intimidating, though, and most experts predicted the series to extend to six or seven games. Indeed, before Game 1, the Warriors winning in six games or less fetched better than even money. How the city of Cleveland must long for ‘before Game 1’.

It was not hard to imagine a series where neither team could stop each other. Sure, a team handing Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love heavy minutes had no hope of stopping the Warriors, but what answer did Golden State have for stopping LeBron James attacking the rim surrounded by four elite shooters?

All the answers, it turns out.

The Warriors are doing to the Cavs what the Thunder did to them in the previous round. They’re switching everything and their length is in Cleveland’s head. Their defensive rotations are immaculate, and their recovery speed is uncanny.

Even when the Cavs do move the ball, the Warriors are jumping their cadences. Beats of the offence that feel like they should be an open shot are met with Andre Iguodala or Draymond Green right in Love’s face. Either a bad contested shot goes up or the offence resets to zero, starting all over again in search of a bad contested shot.

Against Detroit, Atlanta and Toronto those shots were open. But a dialled-in Golden State defence is an animal that Cleveland hasn’t dealt with, a creature that lives only west of the Mississippi.

The Cavs crushed the league with their Irving-Smith-James-Love-Frye group and their start the second and fourth quarter bench plus James units. The Atlanta Hawks still wake up in cold sweats after nightmares of those line-ups. But those groups have been neutered by Golden State’s switching, and they’re getting slaughtered on the other end. When Frye or Love is your rim protector, your rim has no protection.

For a stretch in Game 2, coach Tyronn Lue even tried James at centre, which offered even less defensive intimidation. After that, Lue opened the fourth quarter with Timofey Mozgov alongside Tristan Thompson – an admission to the world that he is very much in ‘see what sticks on the wall’ mode. The NBA Finals, it turns out, are not the best place to enter that particular mode.

Credit to Lue for trying everything, even if the inference is that he has no idea what he is doing. Basketball is a series of questions and Cleveland have no answer for Golden State. They don’t have enough two-way big men to try and out-size the Warriors, and they don’t have enough quality on the wing aside from James to try and beat them at small-ball. This series is an exercise in Cleveland choosing the least efficient way to die.

Golden State came up against their own seemingly unanswerable question last series. Oklahoma City’s speed, length and force presented the Warriors obstacles that seemed insurmountable. Golden State’s only answer was the last rabbit in their hat: have Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry lose their freaking minds.

With James, Irving and Love, you might think that the Cavs have similar talents that could ignite them and give their team life in the same way that Thompson allowed the Warriors to breathe in Oklahoma City. But this is not Love’s series, if he even plays again (and really, Cavs fans should hope that his concussion symptoms persist for the next fortnight).

Love’s beyond a liability on defence against Golden State, who target him relentlessly like they targeted Enes Kanter in the previous series. Kanter was played off the floor against the Warriors, and Love is going to meet the same fate, whether the culprit is Harrison Barnes’ elbow or the mere realities of basketball.

Irving’s stock has taken the biggest nosedive of anyone in the Finals, outside of perhaps the Leandro Barbosa doubters. He’s shooting 33 per cent and has more turnovers than assists. On 27 occasions he’s taken a shot not off a pass, and he’s made four of them. And that’s the better side of his game, because on defence he’s been an atrocity.

And then there’s James. The King. The self-professed Chosen One.

There are now ten games of evidence that James is unable to gain any sort of traction against Golden State. This season he shot 52 per cent from the field, and 55 per cent in the Eastern Conference playoffs. In the past ten match-ups with Golden State he hasn’t cracked 48 per cent from the field. A lot of that is noise from his one-man show in last year’s Finals, but the eye-test within those match-ups and beyond them suggests that James can’t find an edge against Golden State.

Klay Thompson has regularly switched onto James in the Finals and not allowed him to gain an advantage. Iguodala is the best in the league at defending James outside of Kawhi Leonard, and Draymond Green can hold his own against him in a pinch. The evaporation of James’s jump shot has made him, for the first time, a guardable player.

He will still occasionally roar to the rim for a dunk or overpower a one-on-one match-up in the post all the way to a lay-up, but these are instances of fleeting genius and not of systematic, lasting execution.

These two defeats in Oakland, the worst ever opening stanza to a Finals in NBA history, do not rest entirely at James’ feet. It’s not his fault that Love has no lateral quickness or that Irving doesn’t make his teammates better. But at the same time, this is the team that James built.

He constructed this roster, getting his boys Shumpert and Thompson giant contracts and bringing his Instagram buddy JR Smith back. He made sure Love was en route from Minnesota, talking about how he was looking forward to playing with Cleveland’s young guns in his ‘coming home’ letter and then none-too-subtly failing to mention the team’s two most recent number one draft picks – Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett – who, then, were, of course, shipped out of town for Love.

James was the one undermining David Blatt at every turn, until inevitably, he too was sent packing, replaced by the man whose big man rotation just went from Jefferson-James to Thompson-Mozgov at the change of a quarter.

LeBron James has always done things his way, and sometimes, like in the fourth quarter of Game 6 of the 2013 Finals, his way is the best way. He’s never coalesced to authority, and his teams are built in his image. James is a triumph for individualism.

That’s why, for anyone with a sense of irony, there is something majestic about his team getting destroyed in a way that no team ever has been before in the Finals by a side whose selflessness is universal, and infectious.

A team who can bury a game with a 25-15 run while their own superstar rides the bench with foul trouble. A team that doesn’t sub-tweet its stars to try and ignite them. A team that, barring something unforeseen, is about to wipe the floor with the man who used to be king.