The Race To Lose to LeBron James
It’s that time of the year again when we’re steamrolling towards our annual LeBron James finals party, but maybe just for once someone will come at the King and will not miss?
With the NBA trade deadline passed and the waiver-claims-that-be landing in their playoff-bound destinations, we now have much more of a feel for what the 2017 NBA Playoffs will look like. There are certainly injuries or returns to health that could swing the needle come playoff time, but for the time being there are definitive classes in the NBA. In the Eastern Conference, the narrative is moving a bit from “any team than Cleveland would be insane” to “with Kevin Love and J.R. Smith still banged up, maybe the Cavs aren’t quite bulletproof.” With all due respect to the Atlanta Hawks, the second tier of the Eastern Conference has three teams: Boston, Washington and Toronto. The three sides, who sit in that order in the East right now, are separated by three games, and will present the toughest challenge to LeBron making it seven straight seasons with a Finals appearance this June (sidenote: that’s an insane number, like that’s a crazy super insane number. I can’t even guarantee I will successfully make it through seven days in a row without giving up on existence as a whole because my shower is too cold). So who is going to give the Cavs their toughest test? Brandon Anderson, Serge Leschuk and Jim Turvey sat down by a lovely wood fire stove to discuss this very matter on Sunday.
Jim Turvey: Let’s start by calling a spade a spade. The Cavaliers are still the Eastern Conference favorites. They have an absolute killer in Kyrie Irving, oodles of playoff experience, and The King. Kyle Korver has been acting like the basketball equivalent of Heath Ledger’s Joker the past few weeks, and right now he just wants to watch the Eastern Conference burn. That being said, the Eastern Conference playoffs are going to be way more entertaining this year than in year’s past, right? Maybe LeBron will bust out another “I’ve been a part of some really adverse situations and I just didn’t believe this was one of them” Miranda Priestly-level passive-aggressive jab, but the Celtics, Wizards, and Raptors all seem like teams that could actually put a bit of fear into the Cavs.
Of that group, I’m all in on the Wizards. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Andrew Sharp lately, but I’m ready for a next-level Wizards Party.
It’s not so much that I’m putting the Bojan Bogdanovic trade on par with the moves the Raptors made at the deadline, it’s that I don’t think the ‘Zards (who calls them that? — Serge) needed to make much of a move to be the top challengers to LeBron and co. By this point, we all know the “started 2–8, 32–14 since” stats on the 2016–17 Washington Wizards, but even more than that, it’s the product they’ve put on the court. You know that writing prompt where you need to write a horror story in six words or less? “John Wall in the open court.” There’s your winner. Wall can do literally anything when he’s given an inch of space, and surrounding him with lights out shooters (Bradley Beal, Otto Porter) is simply unfair. Speaking of Otto Porter, when are we getting the Nobel Prize announcement for the work Scott Brooks has done in Washington this year. I know it’s been said time and time again, but OTTO PORTER IS PLAYING AT A NEAR-ALL-STAR LEVEL. Brooks has made Kelly Oubre a serviceable NBA bench player. Those are magic tricks at least on par with anything David Blaine has ever done. Talk some sense into me guys, I’m getting too hot and bothered with all this Wizards talk.
Brandon Anderson: I’m sorry, but did the NBA playoffs suddenly switch to some sort of Gus Macker 3-on-3 tournament without anyone telling me? The Wizards have three real NBA players. Three. I know we’re all excited about how the Wizards almost beat the Cavs a couple weeks ago in the game of the season, but let’s take a step back for a minute. Cleveland played basically a five-man team including an abysmal game from Kyrie until the overtime, while Washington got career games from both Beal and Porter while defending a jillion-game home win streak and STILL couldn’t win a single meaningless regular season game. They’re going to win four out of seven? Gortat and Mahinmi are useless against the Cavs. Angry Morris Twin and one of the Bogdanoviches don’t move the needle for me. Washington just doesn’t have enough weapons to match up with Cleveland, if they even get a shot.
Serge: Maybe there is some magic still left there? You see what I did? No? Okay, I’ll see myself out. The team rests on John Wall and I’m pretty sure I once saw him out-race a real live cheetah in a sprint. I mean, I may have been imagining but we don’t have any evidence saying he wouldn’t be able to do it. That being said, Cleveland has the luxury of having that one guy who’s basically a human Green Lantern except that instead of the ring he is just built like a human version of that submarine from the latest Fast & Furious trailer. The reason I don’t see the Wiz doing anything at all is because LeBron can for stretches of game defend John Wall. He’s a human duct-tape quick fix on defense and you can play him on anyone. Given that everything Washington does starts and stops at Wall, that’s a bad thing for them in seven.
Brandon: If LeBron is the Green Lantern, does that make Markieff Morris the Seth Rogen era Green Hornet?
Serge: Stop it. But like, maybe?
I do have one very serious question we all need to address. Why do people still pick up the phone calls from Masai? As far as I’m aware caller ID has been a thing for as long as he’s been acquiring assets for 25 cents on the dollar and people still answer him? I mean, I get Dolan, twice… But the story goes that he straight up hung up on the Suns during the draft talks and suddenly they send him PJ Tucker for a spare tire. While I’ve had my gripes with Masai having to do stuff just because it made him look smart (how many years away is Bruno now?) this one was some beautiful Oceans 11 type week-long montage on acquiring the player he always wanted for basically a cardboard cut-out of a player (Terrence Ross jokes, I’ll miss you) and then getting PJ Tucker to boot. Now I’ll have to write some new Raptors material outside of “this team has peaked.” This man is a shaman and I won’t have it any other way.
Unlike Danny Ainge, who’s basically Smeagol-ing Rozier and Brooklyn picks, Masai knew the window for this team is small. It’s unfortunate that we happen to have the best Raptors team ever concurrent with the NBA basically housing two separate super-human research facilities in Cleveland and in the Bay, but it is what it is and Masai will always cook. The biggest problem last year was the fact that Jonas Valanciunas, despite having a magical ability to still perplex people with his slow motion pump-fake is more of a liability on defense than Ryan Gosling was in Remember the Titans. Toronto’s collective Father Bismack Biyombo on the other hand a basic theoretical concept of offense but never quite the practical one. Both Ibaka and Tucker address that. They’re physical, play D, and give the Dynos a chance to go small, something that killed them last year against Cleveland. They’re the best positioned team to give this a shot. A lot of things have to go their way, and Kevin Love needs to stay dead, but they can do it. They can now also have a mix of Ibaka, Tucker and Carroll on LeBron at all times, forcing him to play at 100 for Cavs to even stand a chance. The hardest challenge in that is Tucker who plays defense more like he’s running an underground fight club than playing a sport.
Jim: I agree that the Raps have the best path to defending LeBron, but when push comes to shove, when was the last time “defending LeBron” even worked as a strategy. Outside of Kawhi Leonard, Octopus at Law, stopping LeBron isn’t going to happen. Which is why I think the best way to take down the Cavs is going to be to outscore them. As much as I love DeMar Derozan’s season-long loogie in the face of Sports Illustrated, I’m not sure if those long twos and whirling dervishes in the paint are going to hold up under playoff scrutiny. And while the rational side of me knows that Kyle Lowry’s playoff struggles have been in part due to the small sample size nature of the playoffs, there’s a much bigger part of me that just can’t quite put those worries aside and if I can’t put those worries aside, I can’t imagine Lowry can either.
Brandon: I liked both the Tucker and Ibaka pickups for Toronto, I mean credit for actually trying (*cough* Danny Ainge *cough*). They should help Toronto a lot defensively. But can this team actually create offense and score in a playoff series against real teams? I think we brush aside just how ugly the basketball was last summer when Lowry and DDR couldn’t draw all their usual foul calls and combined to go 13-for-37 every night clanging jumpers. Have they really taken the next step this season, or is this still the same old no-assist my-turn-your-turn offense?
Serge: Say what you say but we’re going to DeMar and Kyle buddy cop movie our way to the finals. Remember that time when Lethal Weapon added Joe Pesci and it became like infinitely better. Serge Ibaka is our Joe Pesci.
Also, all of this is moot now that Kyle is gone until Playoffs. I’m inclined to keep it all in here and hope the Raptors actually make the playoffs and last without Kyle to come back. We did beat Boston without him (Rozier couldn’t save them), but it’s a different team at this point and I’m inclined to basically say screw it and get ready for Warriors - Cavs Pt. 3. A lot now depends on where the Raps finish in the East Top 4, the match-up they get and whether or not Kyle has any delays in coming back. As of now, he has exactly 6 weeks until the start of the playoffs. Sidenote: if a Raptors doctor told me I had a flu I’d be getting a second opinion on all kinds deadly viruses that may not even exist yet.
Brandon: Wow that pivot was almost a dead on replica of that dude from La La Land on Sunday night. “By the way, we lost.”
Listen, there’s only real answer here and that’s the Boston Celtics. This team is the Eastern 2-seed at the break despite the fact that their starting lineup has played approximately 4 games together. They’ve already missed 12 games of Al Horford, 10 from Jae Crowder, and 23 Avery Bradley, and that’s beside the fact that I haven’t seen that dude Brooklyn Pick hit the floor even once this season. The Celtics have basically been playing only 3 or 4 of their starters all year while eschewing modern defense and rebounding, and they’re STILL comfortably the 2-seed. That might turn into the 1 with all the Cleveland and Toronto injuries.
Boston has Crowder to limit LeBron. They have a crunch time scorer to match up with anyone. They have the President Brad coaching advantage in every Eastern match-up. They have a deep roster that can go big or small with ease. And they have not one but two X-factors in Marcus Smart and Jaylen Brown. AND THERE’S SUPERSTAR TERRY ROZIER.
Serge: My favorite subplot of this season is how the Boston crowd turned on Horford halfway through the season. That and also given the Kyle Lowry injury somehow Bill Simmons was actually right for once. They decided to stay put and bet that LeBron’s actual half-life cycle is soon and he starts to fold in on himself before making a run. I think they’re here to make a run in the next 2–3 years with Terry Rozier, Finals MVP, but until then they only get to keep their second spot because Kyle got hurt.
Still, there is a 1/10 scenario in which Brad Stevens is an actual dark sorcerer and Boston gets the best of Cleveland in seven. This is also helped by the fact that while IT2 can’t defend Kyrie, no one really needs to defend Iman Shumpert, he defends himself, so you get that luxury of the switch and I couldn’t think of a more terrifying combination, outside of two actual live pitbulls, to have rotating on Kyrie than Bradley and Smart.
Jim: The one thing that Boston has going for itself is its irrational confidence. Not the players’ confidence (though IT and co. are a confident crew), but the actual city. There’s nothing like going into TD Garden and hearing fans say they think LeBron is garbage and knowing that they sincerely believe it (even though they couldn’t be less accurate). Somehow this irrational confidence from the crowd seems to seep into the players’ skin like some sort of gaseous version of “Michael’s Special Stuff” from Space Jam. Suddenly Marcus Smart starts shooting like Larry Bird and Jaylen Brown starts defending like Dennis Johnson. If the Celtics are able to pass the Cavs for the one seed in the East, a potential conference finals matchup would be mighty interesting.
That being said, I think the Celts would lose to the Wizards in the second round because, as we have shown here, the 2–4 seeds in the East are kind of like rock, paper, and scissors. Each team has its strengths that could lead to an upset over the other, but they’re all at least on a similar level. Unfortunately, the Cavs are Tyrannosaurus Rex. You know what beats rock, paper, scissors? A Tyrannosaurus Rex. I mean you could get lucky and hit the T Rex in the eye with a rock like you’re on some David and Goliath ish, but your chances aren’t great. That’s kind of the perfect metaphor for the Eastern Conference this year. (While also being literally the worst metaphor of all time). Any of the Wizards, Raptors, or Celtics could beat the Cavs this season, I mean in the last 12 months we’ve seen just about every fluke result imaginable happen, but LeBron not making the Finals almost seems a bridge too far.
Serge: Without Kyle the Raptors are less like real scissors and more like the kids scissors with protective sides and edges and only one kid gets to use the scissors and the rest of the kids are just hanging out in the corners watching. Oh, and the scissors are blunt. What I’m saying is, the team with the best chance to unseat the Cavs lost it’s best and most important player and at this point who cares. I was debating putting 10–20 dollars on the Raps making the Finals, now I feel like I’d rather eat that money like that kid does a photo of Jason Segel, which is still an amazing way to spend an afternoon.
Cavs are going to the Finals, because LeBron James is a celestial being and celestial beings gravitate towards the finals.
Brandon: Whatever. Just wait til the Celtics finally put the finishing touches on that big blockbuster trade they’ve been working on…
