There will be so much yakking from the myriad of sports outlets about the 50+ year drought, talk of The Drive, The Fumble, The Shot and how the Cleveland sports curse has finally been broken.
This will not be one of those pieces.
The Cleveland Cavaliers did complete a fairly improbable comeback from a 3-1 deficit in winning the NBA title by defeating the Golden State Warriors in game 7, 93-89.
Finally, we had a hotly contested game in this series that has been defined by the teams taking turns bludgeoning each other. The lead swung back and forth,changing 8 times in the first 15 minutes of action and then several more times throughout the course of the game.
In short, it was the type of game we would get for most of this series.
Draymond Green had a monster game of 32 points, 15 rebounds and 9 assist. If it were not for his exploits this would have been another trip to the woodshed, as Stephen Curry and Klay Thopmson were not their normal selves , Curry scoring 17 points on 6-19 shooting and Thompson added 14, while only shooting 6-of-17 from the floor. For the Brothers Splash, their performance would be considered plebeian at best. Curry, though he averaged 24.4 ppg in the series, he only shot 40% from the floor and was not the player we had seen for the regular season and for most of the playoffs. Thompson had only one game where he shot 50% or better from the floor and averaged 19.6 ppg, and he had some moments in the series, but those were far outweighed the less than stellar moments. It has been said the NBA is a make or miss league and surprisingly enough, the league’s two best shooters missed…a lot.
LeBron won the MVP ( deservedly so) and a lot of the talk will be about him and it is easy to see why. The guy averaged 29.7 points, 8.9 assists and 11.3 rebounds, 2.6 steals and 2.3 blocks per game in the Finals. He lead the series in points, rebounds, assists, blocks and steals. After the first two games, he sacked up and balled out, dropping 41 in back-to-back games which helped to force that game seven. He had some incredible blocks and made some other big plays ,however he looked kind of tentative and turned the ball over more than a little bit. I also thought that he was not razor sharp offensively, only shooting 9-24 from the floor. It was actually Kyrie Irving that hit the go ahead basket and had the proverbial, “eye of the tiger” for most of the game.
Game seven was a gem in an otherwise series that was on the verge of being memorable, not for its quality of play but rather than it placed the period on the end of 73 win season for one of the teams. With the happenings in the last three games it it now etched in history as the series that ended a 52 year pro sports championship drought, the fulfilling of a promise, and missed appointment with destiny.
