NBA Finals: Cavaliers, LeBron James Blow Out Warriors in Game 3
Unless you watch a metric ton of basketball, it can be difficult to appreciate just how different the postseason overall and the Finals especially are from the regular season. As teams go from game to game throughout the year, facing a different opponent each time out, spending a week or more on the road at a time, they obviously rely on scouting reports, recent trends and other intel, but more often than not, the contests are rough drafts. They test, they probe, they see what works and doesn’t, they (hopefully) learn things.
When it gets to the playoffs and teams face a single opponent game after game with comparatively large swaths of time in between, there’s ample time for preparation, for rethinking matchups. You’re probably expecting me now to say that the Cleveland Cavaliers smartly made those kind of adjustments in order to blow out the Golden State Warriors by a score of 120-90 to make the series 2-1, but in fact, the decision was more or less made for them when Harrison Barnes’ elbow met the back of Kevin Love’s head in Game 2, keeping him off the floor.
Sure, you can point to the fact that Love is a minus defender and that Cleveland has never truly been able to unlock the prodigious offensive chops he displayed with the Minnesota Timberwolves. You can note that the Cavaliers’ defense was truly stifling in a first quarter that saw the Cavs more than double up the Warriors 33-16. Golden State shot 35% from the field, 10% from 3-point range to Cleveland’s 71.4% and 50%, respectively. There are, for sure, mechanical reasons that the Cavs without Kevin Love are a tougher matchup against this particular team.
But there was also a distinctly different feel to the Cavs right out of the gate. Maybe it was playing at home, but maybe it was also getting pushed out of their comfort zone by Love’s injury. Although that implies that they ever looked completely comfortable with Love playing against the Warriors. Let’s just call it the “uncomfort” zone, an area the Cavs have gotten to know well over the past couple years as they’ve spent more time trying to figure out what they’re supposed to be than what they are.
Because for all the obvious talent on the roster, Cleveland – especially in the first two games of this series – has looked like Ikea furniture: a box of pieces with instructions that generally get everything to fit together decently but won’t impress anyone. Meanwhile, Golden State has looked like a pillow fort, somehow both meticulous and organic, a hand-built structure at once flexible and intricate and above all, just a shit-ton more fun.