History eraser: Cleveland seize Golden State's crown

It was never supposed to go down like this.

The Warriors weren’t just the better team, they were the best team. They’d won 16 more games than Cleveland during the regular season – the same amount that separated the Cavs from the Wizards.

Everything made sense after Game 2 of the finals. Game 3 got weird, but then Game 4 restored order. This series was done.

And, had Draymond Green maintained his composure, it likely would have been done. But Green’s descent into adolescence gave the Cavs.

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» Cavs make history

They seized it, ran with it, and then buried the Warriors in the grave that seemed destined for another just a week ago.

The Warriors still might be a better team than Cleveland. All series they got better shots, wide-open looks, but they didn’t fall in Games 5 or 7. Stephen Curry’s miss off a screen with four minutes left and the score tied in Game 7 was instructive – it was right there, with the title to grasp, alone on an island with everything that was rational pointing to it going down. But it didn’t, and yet Kyrie Irving’s shot – contested, off the dribble, falling away – did.

It was symbolic of the series – when you leave the door slightly ajar, the wolf that is ‘small sample size’ starts knocking at it. And nothing is as potent in a small sample as transcendent individual brilliance.

The Cavaliers deserved this title. They might have stolen it, but the trophy, however it was obtained, ended up in the right hands. Before Game 1 it seemed like the Warriors had the best player in the series, and three of the best four. As it happened, Cleveland had the two best players in the finals. That turned out to be a fact more insurmountable than the aura of 73 wins.

The Cavs didn’t win this series because of LeBron James – they won it because of James and Irving. James being better than Curry in the finals was foreseeable, and as far as the Warriors were concerned, manageable. But Irving being better than Curry – and Klay Thompson – was not, and it was Irving’s shot-making in Games 3, 5 and 7 – those sumptuous kisses high off glass that need to be taught in geometry class, the pull-up jumpers after stopping on a dime with a suddenness that raises its middle finger to the laws of gravity – that made the difference.

Of course, James was still the key. His back-to-back masterclass in Games 5 and 6 will be taught in basketball university for the rest of time. His athleticism was ferocious, his intelligence was otherworldly, and his timing, in so many ways, was immaculate. He was a symphony conductor on offence and Darth Vader on defence – his ominous presence loomed in the minds of every Golden State player on every transition attack, rendering them impotent with fear.

This series was James’ magnum opus – the introductory paragraph in any argument that will ever be made for him to supplant Michael Jordan as the greatest. He came up against the best of all time and laid them to waste, reminding them, and us, that a singular force is often enough to tear apart team-wide balance and cohesion.

This Cleveland team has never really made sense. They have four power forwards who all need to play, and two dominant perimeter ball-handlers who both need the ball to be effective on offence. Iman Shumpert’s hair is a debacle and Mo Williams played Game 7 as though it were a December game in Milwaukee. Where everything in Golden State appears to be coherent, nothing is so in Cleveland.

But what these Cavs lacked in logical construction they compensated for with composure. James and Irving never wilted from big moments – they were emboldened by them. Tristan Thompson wishes every game were a finals game against the Warriors. Even Kevin Love, so maligned, was excellent in Game 7. For so long he could find no place on his own team or against this particular opposing team, but in the biggest game of the season he found a way to make an impact, scrapping on defence (how big was that final switch onto Curry) and dominating the boards.

Where the Cavs were calm and surgical, the Warriors were flustered and wasteful. Cleveland were defined by James’ composure, the Warriors likewise by Curry’s oddly disengaged state.

In Game 7, only Green – in a remarkable performance that will now sadly be lost to history – rose to the occasion. In arguably the biggest basketball game in three decades, one featuring James, Curry, Irving and Klay Thompson, Green was the best player on the floor. He kept the Warriors alive in the first half, but he found no friends and no helping hands in the second.

The help wasn’t going to come from Harrison Barnes, who spent the last three games of the series hopelessly in his own head (five for 32 shooting), so tortured on the court, alternating between over-aggressiveness and total passivity.

Steve Kerr didn’t do his team many favours either, with several costly blunders. The Anderson Varejao experience has been a catastrophe all season, aside from brief delusions of adequacy in the third quarter of game seven against OKC. Giving him eight precious minutes in Game 7 of the finals was disastrous. As bad as he was playing, those minutes needed to go to Barnes – you live and die with a core member of your team about to get a max contract, not the guy who hasn’t been good at basketball for four years.

Leandro Barbosa was bizarrely used as a defensive end of quarter replacement, begging to be taken advantage of by James on a switch, which, of course, he was. And then there were the inexplicable Festus Ezeli minutes in the fourth quarter, which shifted the game’s momentum – permanently, as fate would have it.

None of these Kerr mishaps would have mattered if his star had been able to remember who he was. Curry will never be able to run from these finals. His numbers were bad – 40 per cent shooting from the floor, only four free-throw attempts a game, less than a steal a game despite being the league’s leader in that stat, and more turnovers than assists. In the regular season, he seemed to be transcendent every second or third night. In the finals he never reached that level, and in the entire playoffs he only got there twice – overtime against Portland and Game 7 against the Thunder.

Physically, he never looked right, rarely able to generate separation on switches. Being unable to do that against Thompson might point to Thompson’s great defence, but an inability to get a clean shot off against Love one-on-one on the biggest possession of his career points to something just not being right. Curry’s playmaking was subdued, and he was careless with the ball – no physical malady could justify those atrocious, left-handed, around-the-back or hook passes to no one.

He was exploited and embarrassed on defence, to the point where Cleveland’s lone offensive strategy appeared to be ‘find Steph Curry’. This strategy ended up winning them the title.

Curry barely got to the rim, and he spent the finals looking like a poor man’s Kyle Lowry, without Lowry’s defence. The two-time MVP, the NBA’s golden boy, had his colours lowered, and it won’t be until the same stage next year that he’ll be able to rectify things. It will be a longer 12 months for Stephen Curry than most of us have known.

2016 for Curry will be what 2011 was for James. James was hesitant and afraid in that series against Dallas, but he soon found his redemption. Now, three titles later, the third of which is surely the sweetest, he has reasserted himself as the game’s preeminent player.

All season the Warriors were heralded as a historic team, but the history we witnessed with LeBron James towers over ‘73′.

These Cavs were built as James wanted them to be built. He’s been criticised in the past for his obsession with control, not least of all in this space. But his performance on the court has always spoken louder than anything else. Even after his post-game speech, which was a little heavy on the singular pronouns, all you could do was bow down before him, as he bowed down before God on the hardwood floor of Oracle Arena.