It has never happened in the NFL, or in the NHL, or in Major League Baseball. The NBA was going to be the first of North America’s four major sports leagues to see the same two teams reach its championship series in four successive seasons.
We were all so sure of it back in September.
Now that we’re here, though, it’s important to underline just how uncertain things looked as recently as Sunday morning. It took two Game 7 victories — on the road — to clinch this quad-shot serving of Golden State versus Cleveland for the NBA crown.
As Houston coach Mike D’Antoni said once the matchup was sealed: “Hat’s off to them.”
D’Antoni was referring to the Golden State Warriors and their latest uber-demoralizing comeback in the second half against the Houston Rockets, but go ahead and lump the Cleveland Cavaliers in there, too.
I understand that there is very tangible Warriors/Cavaliers fatigue in various corners of the basketball universe. I get it: The denizens of 28 other fan bases want something “different.”
I also know that you’ll struggle to find anyone with the gumption to pick Cleveland to win more than a game in this series; most of the experts out there would probably pick Golden State in a sweep if not for the “you have to give LeBron James one game out of respect” clause in all of our contracts.
But let’s not pretend that the finals matchup widely anticipated before the season’s first dribble — or even at the start of these playoffs six weeks ago — seemed automatic by the time we reached the conference finals.
It really wasn’t.
The Warriors and Cavaliers, remember, have already teamed up to lose 11 games this postseason. (They were a combined 24-1 heading into the 2017 finals.) As we’ve covered countless times in recent columns and newsletters and tweets, Cleveland specifically has endured too many dramas to list over the past nine months, and has the most flawed roster to surround James since the Cavaliers made their breakthrough as a title contender in 2007.
That’s a claim you can make with even more conviction after learning from the ESPN research ace Micah Adams that James scored or assisted on a whopping 55 percent of Cleveland’s points during the first three rounds of the playoffs, smashing his previous career record of 49 percent with the ‘07 Cavaliers squad that he unexpectedly led to the finals in only his fourth NBA season.
And we repeat: Both teams had to win Game 7s on the road to get here.
The Montreal Canadiens and the Detroit Red Wings faced off in three consecutive Stanley Cup finals from 1954 through 1956. The Detroit Lions and the Cleveland Browns met in three straight NFL title games from 1952 to 1954 — in the days before the Super Bowl existed. And the World Series, long before either of those trilogies, was strictly a New York affair with the Giants dueling the Yankees in 1921, 1922 and 1923.
Yet the modern-day Warriors and Cavaliers, in a bloated league of 30 teams, trumped them all. The most star-laden team and the sport’s most feared individual force will clash once more to extend one of the fiercest rivalries this league has ever witnessed.
Not a bad thing.
“The rest of the NBA has to get better,” Golden State’s Klay Thompson said Wednesday on the eve of Game 1. “It’s not our fault.”
Cleveland’s Game 7 triumph in Boston also came with the bonus of (hopefully) preventing speculation about James’ free-agent future from completely swallowing up the finals.
Don’t get me wrong: There will still be plenty of talk over the next two weeks about what James will do July 1 amid the growing belief that he’ll be leaving his home-state Cavaliers this offseason to join a team better suited to consistently challenge Golden State. Rest assured that the Rockets’ understandably devastated Chris Paul — who made a fast exit from Toyota Center late Monday night after being forced to watch the biggest game of his life from the bench because of his hamstring injury — has already begun his recruitment of James to Houston.
But LeBron is still playing, people.
Against his old buddies from the Bay Area.
Hat’s off to him.
© 2018 The New York Times Company
