Kasler: On Cavs, champs, fear and Love
Champions.
Three days ago, the Cavs made history many times over. Ended a city’s seemingly eternal championship drought. In Game 7. On the road. After being down 3-1 against the best regular season team in NBA history. Defeating the reigning MVP who many said had transformed the game.
Champions.
I wanted to share a few final thoughts but waited a day. There have already been so many great pieces written by so many great writers, it seemed wise not to crowd a credibly filled space.
But more significantly -- and like the few of you who may read this -- I just wanted to take a day to absorb the truth of what went down on Father’s Day. Still seems crazy the Cavs pulled this whole thing off.
Here are my final thoughts on arrogance, fear and Love.
1. Arrogance is the piper who stomped into the Bay Area on Sunday night looking to be paid. And he was looking squarely at the Golden State Warriors.
2. Steph Curry, Draymond Green and even Klay Thompson spent most of this season and postseason dancing, shimmying and laughing at or minimizing opponents. Their arrogance persisted until the final horn, but it was a much more unlikely piece of the Warrior machine who ultimately may have cost them a second title with his hubris: Steve Kerr.
3. The final three games of this series were largely won on the incredible playmaking and offensive gifts of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. But it was also due to the indisputable inadequacy of Curry’s defense. The Cavs spent three games turning Kerr’s “switch everything” defensive scheme into a Warrior nightmare.
4. On more than a few occasions, the Cavs sent whoever Curry was guarding to set on-ball screens, knowing the Warriors would reflexively switch. And so, over and over, Irving and James ended up with the little engine that couldn’t fitfully struggling to contain them.
5. Kerr watched this happen. A lot. No adjustment. Very rarely did James or Irving seem ruffled. Sure, they made some contested shots, but I don’t recall too many times where the Warriors' defense made them uncomfortable.
6. Kerr simply believed what had worked all year would work again. This is fine, right up until it doesn’t work anymore. That moment happened early in Game 5 and begged for a shift in strategy that never came. Kerr is a great coach, was a money player in his day and sure seems like a jolly good guy. But his arrogance in adhering to a defensive philosophy that had been broken cost his team dearly.
7. A final thought on arrogance: Enough has been written about Thompson’s comments toward James and the Warriors generally dismissive tone all series. But for me, Curry is the one who may need to be viewed through a different lens now. It’s all fun and games, the shimmies and the points to the sky after every basket, when the ball is splashing through the net.
8. But what happens when you go to the bucket and, time and again, a bigger man volleyball spikes your soft layups into the stands, like a child being teased by his older brother? Where then are the shimmies and shakes and dances and points to the sky? I’m sure Curry will be back to his old tricks next year, posting big numbers in regular season games played at half speed while ESPN breathlessly falls to its knees in deifying awe. But he may think about shelving the antics when postseason comes around, and the big boys decide the court is going to be theirs for a few hours, day after day.
9. Kevin Love. You can exhale now. I wonder what it was like for him to hold his breath for two years?
10. This guy spent two season under a constant microscope. Admittedly, there were times when I thought his time here was a failure and needed to end. But he is a champion now. And his 14 rebounds aside, it was his defensive effort on Curry as the final minute ticked off the clock in Game 7 that defines him. By now, everyone has seen the clip of Love working his tail off, leaving his soul on the court in that final sequence that ultimately ended with a Curry missed three.
11. Love can enter next season with the weight of the world displaced onto some other set of shoulders. I expect his third season to be his best, perhaps not statistically, but in terms of fit and self-confidence.
12. A final thought on Love: I spent the past two season expecting him to post 20 points and 12 rebounds every game. And what I realized is that his role simply doesn’t allow for that. He plays with arguably the two best isolation scorers in the NBA. So what we need to and should accept is that some nights, Love will need to get 25 and 14. But other nights, he may only need to get 12 and 7. And that’s OK.
13. Love is a great talent, but he is the third option on a team where the first two are named James and Irving. His numbers will not be consistent night to night, but that’s by design not because he has lost his game. It took me two years to grasp this.
14. Chauncey Billups said Kyrie Irving became a superstar in the Finals. Not just an All-Star -- a superstar.
15. In Game 7, Kyrie truly became James’ Dwyane Wade. Here’s what I mean: So many people have long talked about how LeBron makes everyone around him better. When he went to Miami, though, he teamed up with Wade, a guy who certainly benefited from LeBron’s presence but didn’t necessarily need it to be great. Wade was already great in his own right, LeBron didn’t need to pull that out of him.
16. Irving used the NBA Finals as a platform to show everyone, including James, that his greatness is truly his own now. James no longer needs to worry about “making Kyrie better.” That burden can be released now. I always thought it was unfair that folks so casually expected Lebron would just show up and make everyone on the roster better. James has proven he can do that, to be sure, but you can’t win a title with one guy tugging the other 11 along for a ride.
17. Irving is a champion and while he certainly isn’t James’ equal -- no one is, this is not up for debate anymore -- he became “the other” superstar in this series.
18. That said, I’m looking forward (I’m not) to the pieces this summer that wonder if the Cavs can repeat with a shoot-first, dribble-much point guard like Irving. Some narratives, I suppose, can never be slain.
19. I wrote before Game 7 that the Cavs had transformed into a team with no fear. Not that they were ever viscerally scared, but I think it was Game 5 where they realized the Warriors perhaps didn’t deserve their unabashed respect. Curry, Thompson, Green ... three guys who were the core of a lineup called “death squad” no longer deserved the Cavs' fear.
20. This fearlessness manifested in a number of ways. One is the previously mentioned blocks by LeBron on Curry shots at the rim, one punctuated by strong words and cold stare from James. When I saw that in Game 5, I knew that while the Cavs might not win the series, LeBron was out to inflict some humiliation on the NBA’s favorite son. James’ monstrous chase down and block of Andre Iguodala’s layup at the end of Game 7 was another moment of absolute fearlessness.
21. Repeatedly targeting Curry when the Warriors played defense was yet another turning point that signaled the Cavs not only weren’t afraid, they were hungry to teach the young man a lesson. Irving and James attacked Curry in a variety of ways -- raining shots over him, blowing by him on trips to the rim or, in James case, just backing the little guy down into the paint.
22. If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably picked up on the disdain for Curry. Some of it is tongue in cheek. But a lot of it is based on a feeling I had all season that Steph was being romanticized into something he maybe wasn’t.
23. Yes, he is an otherworldly shooter. Probably the best ever. I’m not foolish enough to argue this, though I bet Skip Bayless would do it like a good soulless robot does.
24. But I found myself questioning a lot of the other narrative created around Curry -- we were told about his humility only to watch him celebrate every single bucket in self-serving fashion; we were told he was changing the way the game was played, only to watch him generally hide on defense; his rebounding and passing was good, not great, yet some people wrote articles wondering if he was the best player ever.
25. So to see him get eaten up by James and Irving all Finals long, it seems fair to question if Steph needs to be reevaluated. His greatness as a shooter is so supreme, that it would be ridiculous to suggest he’s not a great player. He is. But unanimous MVP? Best player in the league? That’s a joke now.
26. I don’t personally think Curry is the best player on his own team. I’m not sure he’s even the second best player on his own team. These are not hot takes, these are honest musings, which is more than can be said for the multi-platform “LeBron might leave Cleveland” takes that ESPN trotted out less than 12 hours after the Cavs made history.
27. ESPN please, please, go away. Come back when the Bristol matrix is broken and human beings are again running the show.
28. Enough. Cleveland Cavaliers. Champions. The moment that final horn sounded on Sunday night, wherever you were, whoever you were with, whatever howl you let loose into the night sky, that moment will never die.
