More Top Picks Best Toiletry Bags For Men
player ready...The parallels are becoming eerie. Too eerie. Maybe the Cleveland Cavaliers — yes, those Cleveland Cavaliers — can win the NBA championship. Everyone said anyone could come out of the East this season, and, it seems, anyone did.
Big star, No. 23, perhaps the best individual player in the game who has been thwarted in the playoffs, though his team was getting better each year. The star, then Michael Jordan, had been doubted — not his talent or his Nike endorsement contract, but his ability to lead a team to a championship and get by a rival like the Detroit Pistons.
Here was a star who constantly provided self-motivation, as the Cavs’ LeBron James did this season in hanging in his locker stall a picture of himself dunking on Tim Duncan on opening night.
“I was 4 years old the last time we beat San Antonio [in Texas],” James said that November night. “For us to become one of the powerhouses, which we’ve been preaching, we’ve got to go out there and walk the walk.”
So James, as Jordan did before him, challenged himself and his team.
Whenever the Cavs broke a huddle this season, James chanted to his teammates, “One-two-three, championship!”
“Funny faces at first,” James said of the reaction. “I didn’t care. I kept it going. ‘Championship,’ every single day.”
The Bulls in 1991, even with Jordan, were not supposed to beat the experienced Lakers. Scottie Pippen against James Worthy, Horace Grant against Sam Perkins, Bill Cartwright against Vlade Divac, John Paxson against Magic Johnson?
Five games later, the Bulls were champions, on their way to six titles in eight seasons.
Could the Cavaliers be next? Well, they have beaten the Spurs the last three times they have played.
The NBA Finals begin Thursday in Texas, and the consensus is the Cavs could be back in about a week, though only to watch the Spurs celebrate their fourth NBA title since 1999.
There aren’t many who believe the Cavs have a chance. They’re lining up with those who said the Pistons had no chance against the Lakers in 2004, who counted out the Heat when it trailed 0-2 against the Mavericks last year.
Just like the Bulls in 1991.
The Cavs this season broke an 18-game losing streak in San Antonio dating to 1988.
“If you’ve been up on my commercials, someone wise told me that I couldn’t get through Detroit swimming in a pool,” James joked. “So I guess I had to do it on the court.”
With some help.
“There’s no way we would be winning the Eastern Conference finals if it was a one-man show,” James said. “I never put a time limit on when I thought we could reach this point. I honestly believed we could get better every year.
“We won 30-something games my rookie year, 40 games my second year, and in my third year we win 50. My fourth year we win 50, and we have gotten better every single year. You can have so many struggles during the course of a season, so many people criticizing your team, [saying] ‘They don’t have enough pieces, they’re not a good outside-shooting team, coach Brown lacks this, LeBron lacks this.’ But we’ve always believed.”
The 1990-91 Bulls lost in Detroit near Christmas and there was talk of breaking up the team.
And then the eventual opponent Lakers got lucky, upsetting the supposedly invincible Portland Trail Blazers.
And here are the Spurs, who even coach Gregg Popovich admits fell into some good fortune with the Suns’ Steve Nash’s nosebleed in Game 1 of the conference semifinals, the suspensions of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for Game 5 as well as the injury to the Jazz’s Deron Williams in the conference finals.
The Spurs have Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, but the Cavs play a style that mirrors the Spurs, in part because coach Mike Brown and his staff and general manager Danny Ferry all came from the Spurs organization.
“He knows our playbook by heart,” Parker said of Brown. “He was an assistant here for a long time. He knows everybody, all our players. So it’s going to play like two San Antonio teams.”
The Cavaliers are 3-1 against the Spurs under Brown, and even with the electric James, the Cavs continue to play slow, depending on defense.
More Top Picks Best Alienware Laptops
“They’ve kind of snuck up on everybody,” Popovich told reporters. “When you talk about defense, people mention the Pistons and the Bulls this year. Cleveland is right in that category.”
Getting caught up in a grinding, low-scoring game — the Spurs averaged 79.5 points against the Cavs this season — leaves little margin for error, and the Cavs have the best finisher in James. The Pistons’ biggest problem in the East finals was not being able to score enough. The Pistons usually rely on wearing teams down and beating them with execution. But it was the Cavs who kept the games close, and then the Pistons forced tight shots under pressure.
The Cavs will play the Spurs the same way.
“Detroit was the team to beat to get to this point, and we finally got past them,” the Cavs’ Drew Gooden said. “It’s kind of like beating your master before you leave the dojo. I think they got us ready for this series.”
Spurs stopper Bruce Bowen has difficulty with James because of James’ quickness and size. James averaged 27 points, nearly a third of the Cavs’ total, in two relatively low-scoring games against the Spurs this season. He became just the fourth player in NBA history to average 25 points, nine rebounds and eight assists in a conference finals, joining Oscar Robertson, John Havlicek and Larry Bird.
It was in the ’91 Finals with the Lakers swarming Jordan that Phil Jackson demanded Jordan look for who was open. Jordan found the then lightly regarded Paxson, and a championship run began.
Donyell Marshall, Damon Jones, Daniel Gibson, Larry Hughes … Do the Cavs have a John Paxson? This may not be so easy.
———-