The 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers
It seems fitting that as LeBron closes one chapter on his career, that one of his most emotional and rewarding seasons needs to be revisited. The 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers were everything from an entertainment perspective. The team had Kyrie’s handles, LeBron’s dominance and JR Smith’s antics. The Cavs were in many ways was a seminal movie that was thrown together and somehow all the components work, it was the direct opposite to their Finals opponents, the Golden State Warriors. The Warriors were a Hollywood blockbuster, it was well-planned and structured and it had a devastating leading man, Stephen Curry. The Cavs were never supposed to beat this fledgling dynasty but somehow Cleveland beat the odds.
The record of a team coming back from a 3–1 deficit in the NBA Finals while being the road team was 0–32. Thirty two teams had tried to come back from that deficit and thirty two had failed, Cleveland is the only team to force the series back to even and then win Game 7 on the road. The driving force being the scoring by LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. LeBron and Kyrie were not daunted by the deficit that they faced, instead they were motivated to not let another championship slip. The previous year, Cleveland lost 4–2 to Golden State without an injured Kyrie Irving and a struggling LeBron James. Kyrie wanted to prove he could play on the highest stage while LeBron wanted to re-assert his dominance over the NBA. The two players carried Cleveland with high-scoring games in Game 5 and Game 6 and brought series back to even. The series moved back to the Oracle where the Warriors had only lost three games during the regular season.
In the first half, it seemed that the Cavs could not deal with the pressure of the occasion. LeBron was not immune to the pressure and had a few unsightly turnovers while his primary target on the defensive end, Draymond rained down from three-point land. The Cavs went into the break down by seven and needing the best player in the league to drag them out of the mud. In the second half, LeBron found that extra gear that no other player in the league has. He locked in on the defensive end while also providing much needed scoring to a team that was misfiring in a crucial game. In the first half, both Kevin Love and JR Smith had underwhelmed but LeBron’s extra energy raised the spirits of his team. JR Smith knocked down two crucial threes in the third to reduce the deficit and meant twelve minutes would define a season.
Both teams traded buckets until the last few minutes of the game, the score was tied at 89–89 and LeBron pulled out a superman moment. The Warrios were on the fastbreak after Cleveland missed, Iguodala was clean through to the hoop and suddenly LeBron James blocks the easy layup. The call by Jeff Van Gundy will stand in time forever, at that moment the balance shifted in the favour of Cleveland, led by the homegrown Goliath. Each play was finely poised, the after time-out actions were a game in itself and Tyronn Lue managed to outwit Steve Kerr. Kerr wanted to keep Curry away Irving on the defensive end and Ty Lue used the pick and roll to switch defenders and force Curry to defend Kyrie. Kyrie Irving seemed to enjoy playing with Curry as he crossed the ball, time dwindled before Kyrie stepped and launched a three. The ice in his veins was clear, the ball dropped through the hoop cleanly and Cleveland was up three. For Kyrie, it was justification for his star status that he has earned during his career in Cleveland, the status that many pundits knocked for not being a traditional point guard.
The last key moment was fitting, the often derided Kevin Love showed why LeBron had the front office acquire the forward from Minnesota. Cleveland needed a stop and Kevin Love managed to stop one of the most elusive guards in the league. Love switched onto Curry and smothered the guard who was born in Cleveland using his frame, somehow he kept up with a player who usually liked roasting unathletic big men. As the clock ticked down, the Warriors’ chance of winning Game 7 dwindled. As the buzzer sounded, it was pandemonium and for the man from Akron, Ohio, all of his emotions spilled out.
A lot of fans remember those moments and it is likely that it will be crystallised in NBA history. The reason why Cleveland’s victory in the 2016 Finals is so special because of the road that the Cavaliers took to the championship. During the season, Cleveland chose to fire David Blatt, the coach who had led them to the 2015 NBA Finals in the previous with a roster that had been depleted with injuries. David Blatt was a head coach who had been successful before Cleveland, he won the Euroleague with Maccabi Tel Aviv before coming back to America to coach Cleveland to the NBA Finals. Yet, he was fired in January of 2016 due to issues relating to his ‘fit’ within the team. It was strange that a team who was destined for the Finals would fire the coach who had taken the team to the Finals the previous year but there is a possible explanation for this.
Blatt’s coaching style clashed with LeBron’s ideas about the coaches’ role. Blatt wanted control over the gameplan while LeBron believed that the coach should build a team around the players that he had instead of trying to fit the roster into his vision. It was clear to all who watched the Cavaliers in the earlier part of the year that there was some underlying tension, in the previous year the tension was due to Kevin Love’s chemistry with his team-mates. In that case, it resulted in LeBron’s infamous ‘FIT-OUT’ tweet that called out Love to adapt his game to what the ‘Big Three’ needed. With Blatt, the tension built slowly, there was an incident relating to a game-winning play that he had drawn for another player against Chicago in the 2015 playoffs. LeBron rubbed the play out and drew a play for himself, seemingly emasculating David Blatt. That was the first incident, the next incident happened during the 2015 Finals series, LeBron was calling substitutions from the bench and was essentially coaching Cleveland.
The tension seem to dissipate for a period but in January/December, during the toughest stretch of the season the tension re-appeared. Players were irritated at Blatt’s distant style of coaching and could not respect a coach who had never played in the league. There was a disconnect between the players and the coach and it is likely that LeBron’s tension with Blatt meant that Cleveland had to fire David Blatt. Ultimately, the decision taken by David Griffin was a wise one as it meant Cleveland appointed a coach who could push LeBron as LeBron respected Ty Lue, the NBA champion. At the time, it was seen as a strange decision to fire a winning coach and bring a rookie head coach in when the Cavs should have been preparing for the play-offs.
The team was also hugely dysfunctional with the underlying tension between LeBron James and Kevin Love being a huge part of the problem. Kevin Love was acquired by Cleveland after LeBron resigned in the summer of free agency, it was expected that the scoring machine who had grown in Minnesota would be an able running-mate for LeBron James. However, there were fit issues, Love had been the first option in Minnesota and it was diffficult to acclimatise to a team that primarily ran isolation plays through Irving and LeBron. Moreover, Love had to sacrifice aspects of his post-game and become more of a spot-up shooter in order to fit into the LeBron and shooters system that has become incredibly successful. The tension was ever constant during the first season and during tough road trips where Love would often be isolated, there would be long silences between the two All-Stars.
The acquisition of Channing Frye helped a lot in easing the dysfunctional relationship between the two players as Frye brought Love out of his shell and integrated Love into the team much more. Even still on the court, Cleveland could not find a way to successfully integrate Love’s scoring and presence on the block into their offence. Tyronn Lue was happy calling isolations for Irving and James in which they could free-wheel on offences. He rarely called plays on the block which would take advantage of Love’s skillset. Furthermore, Kevin Love was expected to become a superb rim protector and defender in the mould of Chris Bosh instantly. There were heavy expectations placed on Love to become an anchor even though he had never been that kind of player, in Minnesota he always had a strong defensive player next to him like Pekovic or Al Jefferson. Love never became that kind of player and Cleveland’s offence never ran as efficiently as it could if Love was utilised properly.
That being said despite Cleveland’s dysfunction, it came together during the playoffs, everything suddenly made sense. Kyrie and LeBron handling the offensive duties meant that efficient looks were being created and Cleveland could often put teams away with just their scoring. There was one notable game against a well-coached Atlanta side which they made twenty threes which helped proved the potency of the offensive system. Cleveland was also pretty solid defensively with LeBron being a lockdown defender and JR Smith committing himself to the defensive end against guards like Derozan, Klay Thompson and Reggie Jackson. Along with the starters, Cleveland also had defensive pests like Dellavedova and Shumpert coming off the bench who could contest every shot, it worked so well that Cleveland was a top-ten defense. The only time during the second LeBron era in Cleveland.
The Game 7 victory in the Oracle Arena was not only cathartic to James and players who had been openly mocked like JR Smith, it was also cathartic to the state of Cleveland. Cleveland as a state in all sports had not won a sports title for 52 years, the last major sporting accomplishment in Cleveland was the 1964 NFL title won by the Browns. There had been so much heartache across all of Cleveland professional sports, there was ‘The Fumble’, ‘The Save’ and the most infamous of Cleveland’s sporting failures, ‘The Decision’. All of those events across the Browns, Indians and Cavaliers meant that it seemed that Cleveland was cursed and would never win anything. The Cavs winning the championship in 2016 broke the curse and allowed the city real hope for the first time in forever that their sports teams could achieve something. The curse was broken by the Cleveland Cavaliers and Ohio’s most famous son but the effect of the hope created by this team was realised on May 14 2016 in Curitiba, Brazil.
Stipe Miocic is another son of Cleveland who is known for his support of the Cavaliers. It is likely that their title run gave him the hope and confidence that a Clevelander could win on the international stage and hold the gold even in a fight where he was an underdog. Miocic had travelled to Brazil to fight in Fabricio Werdum’s home country against a hugely talented opponent in the form of Werdum. Miocic knocked out Werdum and then a few weeks later was present celebrating with his friends of the Cavaliers team. For Cleveland, it was a celebration of their sporting success after falling short for so long.
LeBron will always be the first talking point among hot-take artists and analysts for the fact he is unique. The son of Akron who bounced from address to address as a child achieved something that most players never achieve, he won a championship for his hometown against all the odds. The Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016 had that underdog spirit that LeBron is known for, it never gave up and fought to its last breath against one of the most dominant teams of all time. Cleveland fought against its opponents and internal struggles to bring a title home for the first time in fifty two years, the 2016 Cavaliers were simply special. As for LeBron, his second go-around in Cleveland will be defined by that title, in twenty years time nobody will care about the three Finals loss. They will only care about the magical moment that the forward from Akron, Ohio created.
