We Probably Know Who Will Be in the 2017 NBA Finals
Barring injuries, there is very little room for error while making predictions of this magnitude, so what does each team have to do to actually make this come true?
A few days ago, I only half jokingly suggested that we play the NBA year out in reverse. Let Cleveland and Golden State go at it in a best of seven series in early November and then run back the 82 season that will somehow arbitrarily be worth more than the championship itself. The logistics weren’t fully thought out (d’uh), but the suggestion was rooted in the very reality we live in (as opposed to the very reality we don’t and the one where Trump lives where he is actually already the undisputed emperor of the world with a dowry and he has become a God… Oh, great, I made myself sad again). It’s hard not to see Golden State making, what, with the army of top players of this generation all in one team Expendables style except in their prime. It’s hard not to see Cleveland making it by virtue of them being in the East and having a human equivalent of an experiment where someone in some lab somewhere said “we’re going to put together the best version of a human possible to play basketball so here are the his athletic attributes that are borderline supernatural and a combination of skill that is unfair.” Except then they saw LeBron James play and went “well, someone beat us to it.”
That is basically the argument my NFL friends make for the “predictability of the league.” Barring a cataclysmic trade, an event of massive extinction of Golden State or injuries (something no one ever wants to see) we might as well gear up for getting our Finals gear now. It’ll stick. Let’s however outline each team’s path to the Finals and see how it easy it may be to waiver. You know… For basketball science.
Cleveland Cavaliers
The Cavs have undergone lesser change than the Golden State Warriors in the turmoil that followed an epic, outer-space comeback from 3–1 down. They managed to mostly re-sign everyone, giving up only the pieces that were more or less expandable during their serendipitous run. And Matthew Dellavedova, who may be a tougher loss to swallow than man Cavs fans will care to admit (hey, at least you got J.R. Smith back in all of his shirtless glory).
Dellavedova was a weird, but essential wrinkle in the Cavaliers scheme. Over the years, he added to his arsenal as a capable shooter, passer and relief man for Iman Shumpert. Having Delly on the floor allows Cleveland to continuously hide Irving on the weaker defender, but it also grants them another catch and shoot man on LeBron swashbuckling expeditions to the rim. Shump shot just about .295% from behind the arc, making leaving him open easier to swallow for defenses. Despite having a shooting form that you expect to see from someone who has been randomly selected to participate in one of those time-out shooting games; something that’s a mix between a heave, a shot and a pass; something that makes you wonder whether he’s throwing an alley-oop or actually shooting… Despite all of that, Dellavedova managed to steadily improve his three-point shooting ability, culminating in .410% in 2015/16.
More important than his offense, Dellavedova had value to the Cavs’ defensive schemes. He may have been slower than most oppositions, or shorter, or overall not having the visual appearance of someone who is playing basketball professionally on the highest level in the world, but he dogged every single opponent across the court. Delly plays defense with the intensity that is best described as: method actor preparing for his recently cast role in Mad Max: Fury Road sequel. His ability to spearhead a ball handler has been Cleveland’s not so secret weapon in the past.
That being said, even with losing Delly and the fact that LeBron will take multiple games off for the purposes of being human, it’s hard to imagine a team challenging them for the Supremacy of the East. Toronto has stagnated and lost Bismack Biyombo, who was the X-Factor in the East Conference Finals (and evidently the father to a suspicious amount of middle-class white men in our city, #StopWhitePeople2016). Unless the long-two somehow becomes the new basketball revolution (something the Bulls are hoping for as well) they’re hardly going to cross that threshold. The only real threat remains Boston, who have tangled with the Cavs before and have added Al Horford to the mix.
The truth of the matter is, this Cavs team is much more reminiscent of late-career TD Spurs. They will coast to a 50 win season based off the fact that they surrounded LeBron with good enough talent to do so while taking an occasional night off and then not face Boston until LeBron is in his planet destroying, hope eating, franchise eradicating playoff spring-time mode. They will probably sign someone like Mario Chalmers to add to the defensive woes they’ll experience and get ready for a long strategy session against the Warriors in late May.
Displacing Cleveland however, isn’t as much to do with luck as it is with the appropriate match-ups. The main reason I peg Boston as the team that can potentially do it is personnel. Toronto was close, but giving up Bismack ensures that the team’s idea of interior defense is relying on JV, Patrick Patterson, Jared Sullinger and Jakob Poetl. At least one of those Jareds has a negative vertical and everyone else is a minus defender on a good day. Last Conference Finals the post was a no fly zone, this year it’s take off central, something LeBron will thrive on.
It falls to Boston to do two things, possibly snag home court from Cleveland, given how notorious the Garden is to play in. For this to happen, more than a few things have to fall their way, including a Cleveland slide during a LeBron absence. Considering they have a new star adapting to a new offense with a brand new system, that’s hardly a possibility. The most we can ask now is Boston gives them a run for their money.
We all know how this goes. The Cavs will start a season slow, perhaps stumble into November. Rumors of a potential players-only meeting will swirl around before we find out that LeBron took the team out to a live-painting class somewhere in Pasadena prior to one of their games in LA. They bonded, drank red wine and discussed the finer stylistic points of the baroque period. Kevin Love turned out to be the second coming of Claude Monet and his painting from that night is now front and center in the Quicken Loans’ home dressing room. The Cavaliers rattle off a 20 win run and never look back.
Golden State Warriors
Sometimes change can take a while to adjust to. A few teams had “reverse-honeymoon” periods with incorporating a new player into a scheme. LaMarcus Aldrdige took a while to flash some of his old self in San Antonion. Dwight Howard never even took off in LA. Introducing a new major player into an already carefully balanced and equally distributed minutes-ecosystem can spell out “they just need to get the feel for each other” faster than a hot-take pundit can type it. Except, it’s Kevin Durant and the world’s already deadliest offense.
In a weird twist for a team that won a record-setting amount of games, Golden State Warriors do not start this season from a position of power. They start it from a position of a villain. From a position in which they can safely view all of the 3–1 memes ever on the internet. Steph wants to come back and prove that he is better than being locked down by Kevin Love on the most important possession of his career. Draymond wants to come back and prove that he is more than a family jewels hunting mercenary. Klay strikes me as the kind of guy who has an acute memory of all the 3–1 memes that ever existed and the Twitter handles of everyone who ever let one loose on the world wide web. KD… is just happy to be here.
Despite trying to appear anything but, considering the 3–1 series loss and all, the Warriors enter this season as a clear favorite. They have four out of the league’s top 25 players on the roster, two in the top 5, three in the top 10. This is unprecedented. In Kevin Durant they have a versatile weapon who thrives both with and without the ball and feels like he has been constructed in a computer specifically to make their system better. Their starting five has 0 glaring holes and they are built to sustain at least one injury to their fear-inducing core, with enough scoring to go around. Barring any serious catastrophe that takes two or more of the big for out for a while, the Warriors may win 83 games this regular season and visit everyone who ever tweeted anything after their collapse, a fitting title sequence directed by Kevin Smith.
Still, the Warriors do have to survive a grueling Western conference, which may actually be easier done than it was last year. The Spurs are preparing for an era without Tim Duncan, the Thunder have been neutered thanks to GSW’s shrewd off-season coup for Durant and the Clippers have an unfortunate history of being pummeled into submission by the Warriors. The road is wide open, but then again, that’s what we said last year.
The key for the west is to play this into a 7 game series. The displacement of the perceived favorites will not happen in the 82 games that lead up to it. The Warriors can safely field any combination of two and two of their big four on any night and come away victorious, they can afford their players a night off and still score 130. That’s just the nature of this team in one to one game progression. It is also their nature to get complacent. To let the “fun” of being a 73 win team get to their head. To throw errand passes and over-dribble in hopes of a cinematic-ending three as opposed to an easy layup two.
The Cavs proved last year that there aren’t impossible match-ups, only difficult ones (at least when you have the comic book version of the world’s greatest basketball player). Whoever the Warriors come up against in the Playoffs will have to buckle up and play physically. They will have to take the stars out of the game one at a time and force the Warriors to beat them with at least three of their bench players on the court, exposing this team’s lack of depth comparative to last season.
The Warriors have sacrificed integral parts of their offensive production, bench depth and defensive presence for a shot to sign-up Kevin Durant and a historically great starting five. The key is now to make it them pay for it. A team like Utah is well equipped to chase the Golden State Warriors around the perimeter (Exum, Hill, Hood are all plus defenders with Hayward somewhere in neutral) while Gobert patrols the paint. The Spurs have Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard with Gasol. Clippers can field a variation of a Chris Paul led unit where they will have to sacrifice some things to get Wesley Johnson and Mbah a Moute on the court. The key will be to limiting the GSW offensive options from 4 to 2 at a time. I’m not talking about injuries because that is too much to hope for to break your way, and also the Warriors star pool is deep enough to handle one absence. It will be to the other teams in the west to put each Golden State mistake, of which there will be plenty, rooted in complacency under the microscope.
Even if all of these things happen, Golden state is loaded with too much talent up front for any team to safely ride out a seven game series. There are just way too many check-down “odds are [Insert Steph/Klay/KD/Dray here] is going to get hot” options. The Warriors have built a video game dream team of the modern generation and it’s just about riding out the necessary time it takes them to make it back to the podium. Unless they blow a 3–1 lead that is.
