OAKLAND, CALIF.: Thirty-four thoughts for 34 rebounds in Sunday’s 110-77 loss to the Golden State Warriors in Game 2 of the NBA Finals…
1. LeBron James says all the time there’s nothing in the NBA he hasn’t seen before. Well he’s never seen this. Sure, he’s fallen behind 0-2 in a series before, but never has his team looked this overmatched.
2. The 48-point gap through the first two games is the most in NBA Finals history. The Warriors simply look too fast, too strong, too long and too athletic for the Cavs to match.
3. “We didn’t win anything,” James said while surveying the final stats. “No points of the game did we beat them in anything. They beat us to 50/50 balls, they got extra possessions, they got extra tip-ins. They beat us pretty good tonight.”
4. James is 1-3 lifetime after falling down 0-2 in a series. The Cavs came back to win four straight and beat the Detroit Pistons in the 2007 conference finals after going down 0-2, but that’s his only success. He took both the Boston Celtics and Pistons to seven games early in his career before losing and he was swept by the San Antonio Spurs in the 2007 NBA Finals. Folks throughout the Bay Area are wondering if this one will end in a sweep after two such lopsided losses.
5. The most demoralizing part is how the Warriors haven’t even needed Steph Curry to do it. The reigning MVP has produced two relatively quiet games in this series and the Warriors are still blitzing the Cavs without him.
6. “Their small lineup was a lot faster than what ours was,” coach Tyronn Lue said. “Being faster and being longer and athletic gave us some trouble. It gave us some problems.”
7. Now all the attention turns to Kevin Love and how the Cavs handled his head injury in the second quarter. Harrison Barnes caught Love with a forearm/elbow late in the quarter and Love dropped to the ground instantly while clutching his head. The Cavs called a timeout and he remained in the game, even making a 3-pointer after the blow to the head.
8. The team said Love did not present concussion symptoms during the timeout, during halftime or at the start of the third quarter. But he felt dizzy early in the third quarter and pulled himself from the game three minutes into the second half. He has been placed into the league’s concussion protocol and the Cavs are sure to be questioned by the league’s doctors as to their procedure for allowing him to remain in the game, but they aren’t expected to face any punishment for allowing him to continue to play, an NBA source told the Beacon Journal.
9. The Warriors went through a similar scenario with Klay Thompson during Game 5 of the conference finals last year when he was kneed in the head by the Rockets’ Trevor Ariza the night the Warriors won the series. Thompson was examined and returned to the bench after he was cleared to return, but he never re-entered the game. He presented concussion symptoms after the game when he became nauseous.
10. Thompson had eight days before Game 1 of the NBA Finals and was ultimately cleared to return without missing any time. Whether or not Love can be cleared by Wednesday’s Game 3 remains to be seen. USA Today, citing a report by the website InStreetClothes.com, reported last year that the average time missed by a player to a concussion was 8.9 days. The median return time, according to the site run by certified athletic trainer Jeff Stotts, was five days.
11. “I didn’t even know what happened, but at halftime he showed no symptoms,” Lue said. “He didn’t talk about it. Then when we came back out in the third quarter, I could see in a timeout he looked kind of woozy. And then he went back on the floor for a second, and then we had to get him off the floor.”
12. If the Cavs could run into trouble, it’s because they never pulled him from the game after the initial blow. But that will be determined by the league doctors. The concussion protocol is run by Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher, who directs the sports neurology program at the University of Michigan.
13. “Examining the brain is a very complex thing," Kutcher told USA Today last year. “One of the fallacies, I think, about concussion diagnosis – and I've been dealing with this for years in the media and in the public – is that you can always diagnose a concussion 'yes' or 'no' at a given point in time if you just look hard enough. That is a fallacy. The reality is that there are concussions that produce no clinical effect at all, not only no symptoms but no findings on examination or through specific testing. Nothing shows up until an hour or two later or even sometimes the next day.”
14. The cold reality is that Love’s absence may actually benefit the Cavs, particularly defensively. The Cavs have privately feared for months how Love would hold up against the Warriors defensively, particularly when they start running pick-and-rolls on him. One team executive even suggested in March that Love might become the Cavs’ version of David Lee, who went from key piece to bit piece in the Warriors’ championship run last season because of defensive concerns.
15. Then Love was terrific during the Eastern Conference playoffs and chatter surrounding him quieted down. He has to score to make up for his defensive shortcomings and that hasn’t happened in this series. He is 9-of-24 from the floor in two games and now he’s out again indefinitely.
16. Given the way this series has gone and the chatter surrounding the Cavs this season, depending on how long it takes him to be cleared to return, it’s fair to wonder if this was the last time Love wears a Cavs jersey. But that’s a discussion for another day.
17. The Cavs’ biggest problem right now is trying to solve a Warriors team that has won the last seven games in this matchup and they won easily Sunday on a night they didn’t even play particularly well on offense.
18. They shot 54 percent, but they committed 21 turnovers and kicked away a lot of empty possessions. And it didn’t even matter because of Draymond Green and the Warriors’ smothering defense.
19. Warriors center Andrew Bogut had three blocks in the first quarter, then the small ball lineup switched effectively. James got a number of the mismatches he wanted, but often settled for long jumpers on Klay Thompson rather than taking him into the lane.
20. James could’ve had a quadruple-double had he not sat the entire fourth quarter. Instead finishing with 19 points, eight rebounds, nine assists, seven turnovers and four steals. He was all over the place, but this wasn’t one of his finer games. He settled too often, turned the ball over too often and again tried to play through Love (when he was out there) and Kyrie Irving on a night he got little support from either.
21. Maybe it’s unfair to put it all on James, but it’s a position he has been in throughout his career and a position he finds himself in again now. Irving didn’t play well at either end, finishing with 10 points on 5-of-14 shooting. He didn’t register his only assist until the fourth quarter when the outcome had long been decided.
22. Now it’s back on James again to be great and he knows it. The odds of the Cavs winning four of the next five games seem insurmountable at this point, particularly how the first two games have gone. It feels a lot like the way the Cavs ripped the Toronto Raptors by 50 in the first two games of the conference finals, only to have the Raptors come back to win Games 3 and 4 at home. But the Raptors are a long, long way from the Warriors. Right now, so are the Cavs.
23. “I got myself in a lot of trouble tonight personally. I turned the ball over way too much,” James said. “I said after Game 1 we just can’t turn the ball over against a great team and expect to win, and I had basically half the turnovers. … I’ve got to be better. I’ve got to be better with the ball. Trying to play make for myself and play make for my teammates at the same time, I’ve just got to be more solid.”
24. Nothing the Cavs tried worked. Lue tried playing ultra small, using James at center during the third quarter onslaught. He played big to start the fourth, exhuming Timofey Mozgov for the first time in this series and pairing him with Tristan Thompson. None of it mattered.
25. James’ streak of 25 consecutive playoff games scoring at least 20 points ended Sunday. So did his nine-game winning streak in Game 2 after losing Game 1.
26. J.R. Smith has vanished for the second time in as many Finals. He’s shooting 36 percent through eight Finals games with the Cavs (27-of-76), including 29 percent from 3-point range (17-of-58).
27. Similarly, the Cavs’ red-hot 3-point shooting has gone stone cold. They’ve made a total of 12 3s in this series and they’re shooting just 27 percent from deep. They’ve had halves in this postseason where they’ve made more than 12 3s. The Warriors, meanwhile, made 15 3-pointers on Sunday.
28. “They’re daring us to be consistent,” James Jones said. “And right now we’re not.”
29. Jones’ point is that the Warriors are taking advantage of every breakdown. A blown defensive assignment leads to a backdoor cut, which leads to a swing-swing and an open 3-pointer. The Cavs have looked as lethargic and unfocused now as they did during stretches of the regular season. For it to reoccur now, after such a successful postseason run, seems unfathomable.
30. They beat the Warriors twice in the Finals last year by playing suffocating defense and grinding the game to a halt offensively. They had few options on offense and had to rely on James’ woeful shooting percentage but dominant play to carry them. Now they have the same offensive issues they had last year, but without the suffocating defense.
31. The Cavs gave up on Mozgov early in this postseason. He hasn’t been the same player at any point this season that he was last year and it’s tough to see them turning back to him now. But they may not have many other options if Love is forced to miss games.
32. The Warriors have full control of this series. Lue insists there isn’t a mental block involved, that the Cavs just have to play better. Easier said than done against a team that won 73 games in the regular season and has dominated the Cavs now for months.
33. “It’s a trap to think that we’ve figured things out and that we have no chance in the series,” Curry said. “That’s not how we’re supposed to think. That’s probably going to be the chatter the next 48 hours, but we have to stay in our own little bubble and worry about what we’re doing and how we’re going to go out and win Game 3. We’ve been on the other side where people may have thought we didn’t have a chance to come back in the series, and now we have a good handle on it, so we know how quickly it can go away if you do[‘t come out and play the way you’re supposed to and keep the focus and the edge that we’ve played with these first two games. So Game 3 will be fun.”
34. Sure, but for who? Talk to you Wednesday from the Q after Game 3.