#CavsRank Moments: 24-22 (Setting the Tone)

24. LeBron’s Block Party on Stephen Curry

While LeBron’s chase down block of Andre Iguodala‘s layup attempt is currently the greatest block in NBA history, the impact of that block was limited to that possession (it was a pretty big possession).  In fact, had the next minute fifty not gone to the Cavaliers, the chase down block would contain about 1/1000th of the Newtons per kilogram that history will now measure.  Immediately after thwarting one of the greatest transition scorers of this generation, LeBron dribbled down the shot clock and left a jump hook short against the strong lower body positioning of Iguodala.  The 2015 Finals MVP wasn’t really phased and LeBron was unable to capitalize on his monster stop, the score still dead-knotted at 89.  But what happened on the next three Warriors’ possessions can, I believe, be traced back to LeBron’s treatment of Golden Boy Stephen Curry after Game 2.

The misfired jump hook landed in the arms of Curry and he cradled it and waited a second for the other nine to head up court before committing to the idea that no matter what, he was going to shoot a step back three.  So he followed the pack, took a weak screen from Harrison Barnes that did little to parry Kyrie Irving, arguably the league’s worst pick and roll defender from 2011-a week before this game, and made one dribble towards the rack.  Of the 10 Cavalier legs planted on hardwood, just two, both of LeBron’s, touched the dull yellow of the Oracle painted area.  Curry didn’t even think twice.  He stepped back to create space but didn’t actually create much.  He rose and flicked and missed two feet to the right of the square.  (It was also long – had it been on line it could have only gone in as a bank shot .)

After Kyrie Irving’s iconic 3-pointer in Curry’s eye – a simple mismatch strategized in the preceding timeout and made possible by J.R. Smith (he of unlimited range) flaring quickly to attract Klay Thompson – Curry and the Warriors opted to roll the die again: Steph went 3-hunting, with only LeBron remotely close to the paint.  Even after giving the ball up and all 10 players standing outside the arc, Curry dared not dive into the wide open sea, opting instead to cast from the pier against the outstretched arms of the Beach Boy’s nephew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbMS1rcaNR0

In two Finals series against the Cavs, Curry’s command was reduced.  You can credit the Cavs defensive stubbornness to a degree.  But by Game 7, Curry was wholly uninterested in running downhill, and the greatest non-Dream Team lineup ever assembled, the Death Lineup, managed a measly 13 points in the most important quarter in Oracle Arena (maybe NBA) history.  If you want to know why Stephen Curry morphed into the player Phil Jackson, Charles Barkley, and all the old timers described – “he was who we thought he was…” – look no further than the video above juxtaposed to this quote from Steve Kerr about his team’s approach: “A little bit of playing with house money. We should be loose, we should have fun.”

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]A little bit of playing with house money. We should be loose, we should have fun.[/perfectpullquote]

Curry, a player that practices Dude Perfect shots before each game, had exhausted all his house money in the waning moments of Game 6 and was a walking unforced error in Game 7.  LeBron got in his head – it’s that simple.  I think all of us first noticed it when Curry tried throwing down a dunk after the whistle in Game 3: the guy that had only attempted 19 dunks in his entire career was trying to flex some high flying extracurriculars in the midst of a 20 point road deficit and was summarily denied the pleasure.  LeBron gave him a look and perhaps some non-original playground banter to boot.  But the message was singular: “I respect what you can do, but this is my rim, my house, and my league.  Go back to flinging shots from the 3rd row.”  This is where Curry really lost his command.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd2GCwkTd38

He started overthinking his forays to rim, hoping a pump fake and uncalled foot drag air brake would send the bogeys flying by.  No matter what he did, LeBron’s answer was the same.  Few things pumped up the Cleveland faithful more than LeBron spiking Curry’s ball out of bounds before rolling his head to the side and barking out some sort of referendum on Curry’s unanimous MVP status.  At that point, you could tell Curry felt disrespected.  “Where have the kid gloves gone??  First J.R. Smith and the Cavs are displacing me five feet any time I bear hug them during my pindown screens, then LeBron’s swatting every one of my cute layups into the cameras, and now the refs are whistling me for all these fouls?”  [And there goes the mouthguard]

The difference between the 2016 Finals MVP and the regular season MVP was that the Finals MVP, when disrespected, tore the **** outta everything, while the regular season MVP expected that a few of his rushed 3s would find their target and the dam would break.  And by the end of this glorious 7-game series, he was reduced to a step-back 3 point bomber.  The Cavs cued in, and the dam held.  Credit LeBron’s block party for bottling up bobble-headed Curry’s blank stare shimmy swag and scaring him away from two-point land.

23. Tristan Thompson vs the Hawks Frontcourt

Oh man.  We’ve been treated to two straight years of Tristan Thompson’s outright domination of the Hawks, who sport one of the better front court duos in the NBA in All-Stars Al Horford and Paul Millsap.  While Thompson has always been a likable player, he was pegged pretty early as someone with limited upside.  He’s a slightly undersized power forward that can’t space the floor, doesn’t block many shots, and until recently, had trouble finishing at the basket.  But he was a central tenant of the grit squad that disposed of the 60-win Hawks team of 2015.  In that 4-game sweep, Canadian Dynamite speared 17 offensive rebounds.  The entire Hawks team only managed 27 and Al Horford was limited to 19 TOTAL rebounds.  It didn’t stop there.  TT got to the line 27 times which was 3rd among all players to only LeBron (33) and Millsap (29).  He led all players in blocks (7) and minutes per game (39.2) and just completely stole Millsap’s lunch money.  With a career FG% of 50%, Millsap shot just 35% against TT and the Cavs in this series.  Check out the block in the video below after Millsap uses his off arm to try to create space.  (I still remember that block – I was in the middle of nowhere in Utah with no internet to tweet about it.  I finally get to talk about it!)  That’s an elite defensive play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDlQ33jAYEQ#t=1m40s

I mean…you guys gotta realize…Paul Millsap is a really good player. I know TT is capable of playing well at times, but he just seems to go beast mode against the Hawks.

Watch this sequence…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_YHWPq7Nw0#t=31s

Those types of rebounds, where he was seemingly stronger and quicker than the Hawks front court became such a regular occurrence that every single “Keys to Watch” Infographic for the playoffs included something about Tristan Thompson controlling the glass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=940i8APSa7Q

With the Cavs colliding with the Hawks once again in the 2016 playoffs, TT got the chance this season to prove that his domination in 2015 wasn’t a fluke.  There were a lot of similarities to the last series although TT didn’t have to play 40 minutes a game with Kevin Love and Channing Frye in tow this time around.  But despite logging a lot less minutes in this series, TT finished with a comical 24 offensive rebounds in four games, with the entire Hawks team managing just 38.  And once again he was third among all players in free throw attempts and led the Cavs in blocks.  It wasn’t a “for the ages” performance like his 2015 massacre of the Hawks, but he remained impossible to keep off the offensive glass.  This was so demoralizing to the Hawks, who were (statistically) the number one defensive team in the NBA after Christmas and had to deal with the Cavs getting historically hot from 3-point land.  Any time the Cavs actually missed a shot it had to be such a sigh of relief…and then Tristan would gobble up the board anyway.  Here’s a twitter advanced search on “Tristan Thompson” from May 6th 2016, aka the “Frye Day”.  What may have been lost in the pandemonium was that Tristan Thompson had NINE offensive boards.  Reading through those tweets is sublime.  Here’s one of my favorites.

If Tristan Thompson wanted world peace as much as he wants offensive rebounds THERE WOULD BE NO VIOLENCE ON PLANET EARTH #CLEvsATL

— Max Lederman (@Max_Lederman) May 6, 2016

I look forward to Tristan facing off next season against CtB nemesis Al Horford with his newly-minted 113 million dollar contract from the Celtics.

22. J.R. Smith’s Game 7 Boost

The most frustrating board game I’ve ever played is RISK.  There are a bunch of reasons why, but ultimately, losing in risk can be determined hours before the misery actually ends.  I guess in that way, it’s not unlike actual wars, where the conflicts can rage on long after the losing sides’ fate has been sealed.  But that slow death march is just the worst.  You just want the game to end.  Sometimes you’ll notice this in sports.  One team gains control of the tempo and just slowly strangles the other into submission.  In football this can happen at the line of scrimmage and the losing team basically needs some combination of turnovers, special teams, and big plays to overcome the fact that it is getting worked in the fundamental facets of the game (and all the Browns fans say: AMEN).

Fortunately for the Cavs, they’ve got J.R. Smith.  He’s always had the ability to create and make tough shots when the offense just can’t get going.  Without J.R., the Cavs very well might have fallen to the Bulls in the second round of the 2015 playoffs.

In Game 4, with the Bulls leading the series 2-1, the Cavs had managed just four points in a 9-minute stretch from the 3rd quarter to the beginning of the 4th quarter.  The Bulls held a 68-61 lead but it felt like a insurmountable deficit for the Cavs, given their complete inability to generate any decent looks.  And then this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0SJFfOdF4#t=34s

After Mozgov gets that rebound the other four Cavaliers just stand around.  They are completely out of rhythm.  And then, J.R. Smith hits a very tightly contested step back iso fadeaway.  And he wasn’t done.  He hits three more 3s in the next few minutes, giving the Cavs the jolt they needed to hang in there during Thibodeau’s last stand. Of course, the moment everyone remembers from that critical game was LeBron’s buzzer beater in front of the Bulls bench.  The Cavs went on to win the next two games with grit squad ball and history won’t paint the 6-game ordeal as a particularly difficult series for LeBron and the Cavs.  But it almost went south, if not for J.R. breaking the Cavs free of the Bulls stranglehold.  J.R. struggled mightily in the Finals last season and there were many questions going into this season about whether or not he could be trusted in big situations.

I’m not going to open the box yet. Still early. But I have gotten out my big box of J.R. Smith playoff jokes and put it on the table.

— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) April 21, 2015

@tompestak well, if my point is he’s never there when you need him most…

— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) January 19, 2016

Fast forward to GAME SEVEN of the NBA Finals, a situation that cannot be surpassed in bigness. The Cavs, having abandoned the second unit strategies and lineups that eviscerated previous opponents in the playoffs, find themselves at the precipice of disaster. Despite decent defense from both teams, the Cavs have Iman Shumpert sabotaging plays with transition PUJITs while the Warriors were reaping the benefits of their newly installed Draymond Green aimbot. Green has hit four threes in the 2nd quarter and has an and-1 to flex about as well. After the Cavs hung around for a quarter and a half it looked like they were wilting. The offense just couldn’t generate good looks and deep jumper LeBron turned back into a pumpkin. After a couple of turnovers and a Leandro Barbosa 3, it started to feel like they were reduced to defending Australia in a game of RISK. The Cavs had problems. The first was that they were currently behind. The second was that even if Draymond Green cooled off and the Splash brothers remained sub-par, there was the whole issue of the Cavaliers being unable to generate any easy baskets.

Enter: J.R. Smith and his hype pipe. On the very first possession of the half, Festus Ezeli caught a pass with no one in his vicinity. He took a moment to gather, a moment to dribble, and by the time Tristan Thompson made the journey to contest, Ezeli had ridiculously deep post position. But it wasn’t an uncontested dunk so he flipped it off the side of the rim and the Cavs dodged a bullet. At the other end, LeBron haphazardly chucked a pass cross court over a bunch of defenders to J.R. Smith before the Warriors could really set up their half-court defense. As it happened, Ezeli was stuck guarding J.R. on the perimeter. Without worrying about running any semblance of an offense, J.R. took a simple crossover side step and buried a 20 footer on the maligned Warriors big man. On the very next play Draymond Green actually missed a 3. It was a good omen for the Cavs. In just that short amount of time, the tightness seemed to evaporate. The Cavs stopped overthinking and just sought out individual matchups and then worked hard to score in isolation. Tristan Thompson caught a pass in the paint and flipped a shot in over Ezeli (Ezeli had a rough Game 7) and the Cavs were showing signs of life at the offensive end. It’s a good thing, because Klay Thompson (revealed to be the actual “wrong” Thompson) went on a five oh run of his own and the Cavs faced their largest deficit of the game (8). That’s when J.R. hit a patented pipe bomb. Mere inches of space as Draymond Green closed hard, J.R drew nylon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skk_8pFcnpI

Moments later, The Wrong Thompson (TWThompson) actually chased him off the line.  But J.R. has perfected the side dribble step-back to allow himself to be chased off the arc and recover back behind the line anyway.  As TWThompson slipped on by, J.R. rose up and detached his perfectly quiet upper body from his lunging lower body to bring the Cavs within a layup.  On the Warriors next possession, J.R. pulled off a crafty defensive move – faking like he was going to contest TWThompson’s out of rhythm 3 but actually jumping to cut off a passing lane to Steph Curry.  He got a fingernail on it, and the ball kicked around a bit before Kevin Love recovered.  That turnover resulted in Kyrie Irving on an island with Festus Ezeli and using a hesitation dribble to sneak in a left-handed layup from under the hoop on the right baseline.  Tie ballgame.  The tone set in the second quarter had been vanquished and it was a clean slate thanks largely to J.R. Smith’s dynamic shot creating and clutch shot making.  Without J.R., the Cavs wouldn’t be the reigning Champs, so we owe him a debt of gratitude as we bask in the greatest summer ever.