Monday's Cavs-Warriors showdown newest chapter of NBA's fiercest rivalry
By the time LeBron James throws his next Halloween party, this Monday showdown between his defending champion Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors at Oracle Arena will be a forgotten memory.
If James makes another batch of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson “RIP” cookies like he did last time, or has another drum set with a “3-1 Lead” inscription or another stuffed Curry doll at the front door for guests to step over, it will be inspired by the events of the summertime – not the winter. Or, of course, maybe it will be the Warriors howling at the late October moon after they regained control of the NBA’s mountaintop.
Yet while both teams are tinkering their way through this regular season – the Warriors (a league-best 34-6) are still learning how to be at their best with Kevin Durant and the Cavs (29-10, tops in the Eastern Conference) evolving because of injuries (J.R. Smith) and a recent trade (Kyle Korver) – the fact remains that this peerless rivalry is sheer basketball bliss. No matter what time of year it gets re-sparked, and in spite of the fact that James claims it’s not a rivalry at all.
Imagine what Halloween might have looked like if he thought it was.
“We don’t look at (the Warriors) as a rival,” James said recently. “They’re a great team. They’ve been the best team in the league for the last couple years, the last three years, so we just want to try and get better.
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“For us, we’re a good team. And by April, we’ll be a great team. And hopefully, we’ll be even greater in May. And if we can get past that, it’d be great to see. But it’s just the next game. It’s Golden State. They’re a hell of a team.”
Cavs coach Tyronn Lue, meanwhile, disagrees.
“Two teams that have been to the Finals in back to back years, (and) we split, so I would consider it a rivalry,” he said. “But we’re both trying to figure it out, both teams trying to figure it out right now. Us having a new addition with Kyle, and trying to implement him into what we’re doing and what he likes to do, so both teams trying to figure it out and it’ll be a good game on Monday.”
Said Warriors coach Steve Kerr: “It’s a great rivalry. I think it’s a game that everybody who follows the NBA looks forward to. There’s only two of them in the regular season, and we’ve played them back to back in the Finals, so it’s become a much-anticipated rivalry game. It’s good for the game. It’s good for us. It’s good for them, and it should be fun.”
The back-to-back Finals meetings alone are a fantastic foundation for a bona fide rivalry, not to mention the strong possibility that the Cavs and Warriors will become the first ever to collide in three consecutive Finals. Rising tensions are easy to come by when two teams wind up sharing the same room for so long.
While back-to-back Finals meetings have happened 14 times in league history, it had happened only once after the 1997-98 set in which Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and the Karl Malone-John Stockton Utah Jazz met: when James’ Miami Heat downed the San Antonio Spurs in 2013, only to fall to them a year later and prompt his free agency return to his home state. Yet that Heat-Spurs matchup never had this kind of acrimony, with James and Spurs coach Gregg Popovich setting a mutual admiration society tone from the start. Cavs-Warriors, meanwhile, has been decidedly different.
It’s safe to assume that the heightened sensitivities are because, in part, of the never-ending discussion about whether each of their titles was tainted. The Warriors won it in 2015 while Kyrie Irving (knee) and Kevin Love (shoulder) were on the bench, and heard all offseason long about how it would have been different if that wasn’t the case. The Cavs’ 2016 championship came with Stephen Curry ailing (right knee), Andrew Bogut (left knee) missing the last two games and Draymond Green being suspended for Game 5 after a dust-up with James in Game 4 – more than enough to restart the talk-radio type chatter about what might have been if that wasn’t the case.
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The litany of tense moments in the latest Finals only added to the tension. There was Thompson calling a Timofey Mozgov screen “dirty” in Game 3 of the latest Finals, then declaring the NBA “a man’s game” after Game 4 in response to James’ complaints about Green’s trash talk (while also saying James' ‘feelings got hurt’). James and Curry have had their testy moments too (chief among them in Game 4).
Genuine respect for the other’s accomplishment is hard to come by, it would seem, when asterisks and fireworks are always part of the discussion. Christmas Day only added to it, with the Cavs coming back from a 14-point, fourth-quarter lead and winning 109-108 in Cleveland the same way they won Game 7 in Oakland in June: with an Irving jumper in the clutch.
The Halloween shenanigans, in other words, were just a manifestation of it.
“It’s obviously not respectful, so it’s got to be on the other side of the spectrum (of that),” Thompson told Paste BN Sports recently about the Cavs’ clever off-court slights. “They can do that childish stuff. It doesn’t matter to us. All we’ve got to do is handle it on the court, you know?
“I mean when we won the championship, though, we didn’t do some stuff like that. But that’s OK. People are built differently. We’re not going to - I’m not going to hold it against them. I’m just going to go out there, and we just want to beat them down next time we see them. That’s how it is. Hold that in the memory bank, and just remember that they do that stuff … It’s a good rivalry, and it’s good for the NBA. It makes it more fun, you know? It’s rare in pro sports you get rivalries like this, so we enjoy it, and we embrace it.”
Yet for both sides, with an eye on the bigger picture that matters far more.
“Monday really does not matter,” Green said. “It’s about playing well, continuing to grow. (Monday) does not matter. You want to get better each and every time you step out on the floor. And I think if we get better, we’ll win. And if not, we’ll lose.
“But nobody is throwing the towel in or hitting the panic button, I can guarantee you that – either team. Whoever loses on Monday, nobody is throwing in the towel or panicking and saying, ‘We need to make a trade now.’ It’s not happening.”
Follow Sam Amick on Twitter @Sam_Amick