CLEVELAND CAVALIERS 2016 NBA CHAMPIONS THREAD

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Cavs might seriously not make it out of the east, I can't believe how garbage they are defensively. The only consolation is that most of their horrible losses such as the one yesterday and the one against Miami the other day have come in back-to-back games, and in the playoffs they will always have at least one day of rest to assert themselves.
 
It's been a disappointing up and down run - but the officiating has been terrible recently. Kyrie and Lebron get hacked right and left but it's never called because they're so good around the rim. Then a bwck court violation that wasn't and we lost momentum. Those little things add up - especially on the second night running.
 
what happened today may lead to Kyrie balling out of his mind in the playoffs beating Kehlani's hometown team in the finals. :lol:
 
Good to see Mo back out there.

obvious the team doesn't care about the seedings and I don't really blame them.

Chances are we end up with the 1 seed anyway.

Boring part of the year.. can't wait for the playoffs.

We will be ready.


Hope you guys are ready for the ride!!!

#CavsNation
 
SBNATION

DONT FREAK OUT OVER LEBRON JAMES AND THE CAVALIERS

If you simply read NBA analysis or even Basketball Twitter without ever looking at the standings, you'd think the Cleveland Cavaliers were a massive disappointment. No one is ever happy with anything the Cavaliers do. Their wins over lesser teams are marked as uninspiring; their losses are a catastrophe of the highest order.

It is true that the Cavaliers have under-performed relative to expectations. But is that because Cleveland is so much less potent than it should be, or is it because our expectations were out of whack based on that heavy payroll?

The Cavaliers are on pace to finish with the third- or fourth-best record in the NBA, more than 55 wins and the No. 1 seed in their conference, which guarantees a home-court advantage through three rounds of the playoffs. Cleveland is unlikely to win 60 games, sure, but why would we expect them to do that? Over the previous five 82-game seasons, only eight teams -- fewer than two per year -- hit that mark. Winning 60 games is fairly rare and an awful high bar to set for a team that began the season behind the injury 8-ball.

It's not just performance. We expect the Cavaliers to be prettier in practice, to leverage the presence of three offensive megaliths into something greater. Sounds a lot like Miami, circa 2010-12. When LeBron joined Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh on the Heat, we expected a basketball paradigm shift. We expected prompt and frequent genius. For the first two seasons, we got less than that. Have we forgotten?

Have we forgotten that in 2011-12, during that contemptible lockout-shortened season, Miami finished 46-20 (.697), fourth-best in the NBA and well out of No. 1 in the East? That winning clip equates to a 57-25 record in a normal season. Cleveland is currently on pace to win 57 or 58 games this season. So in the most basic indication of team quality, these second-year Cavaliers are equal to that second-year Heat team. (Those Heatians won the title, by the way.)

By the way, the preseason over/under line on wins -- a good proxy for expectations -- on those 2011-12 Heat was set at 50.5. Miami was under by five games. Cleveland's preseason over/under line this season was 57.5. The Cavs will be very close to hitting it, if not going over.

This isn't to say Cleveland is going to do what Miami did. LeBron was younger and better. Wade was way more trustworthy on both ends than Kyrie Irving, though Kyrie is a better shooter. Kevin Love is no Chris Bosh.

But a lot of how we feel about that Heat team (and the utterly dominant one that succeeded it in 2012-13) is based on what Miami did in the playoffs. The Heat nuked the Knicks, ejected the Pacers and narrowly slayed the last-gasp Celtics in a thoroughly epic East finals. Then they pasted the Thunder in the Finals. Everything came together perfectly. Everything snapped into place. The rest was history.

If you'd written the story of LeBron's first two seasons in Miami before that playoff run, it would have been a massively underwhelming yarn. The Heat with LeBron were a disappointment, until they weren't. That applies here in Cleveland, too.

What makes us incapable of presuming -- in fact, hostile to the presumption -- that the best is yet to come from this stew of talent? What makes us believe that by virtue of their singular talents LeBron, Kyrie and Love can form a basketball Voltron and wreak havoc on the league? It (almost) never happens like that! (Boston '08, being the exception to everything.) This Cavs franchise had been among the worst in the league for four straight seasons before LeBron returned and Love arrived. Finals in Year 1, East No. 1 seed and counting in Year 2. Yet, we're disappointed?

Blame the Warriors and Spurs, who are erasing all limits on what elite teams can be. They might both go undefeated at home. 73-9 is gonna happen. 75-7 might happen! Cleveland could win 60, 62, 65 damn games and they wouldn't live up to what's happening out West. Are we to hold that against the Cavaliers, that they too failed to be historically good during the regular season? They are meeting preseason predictions, but they aren't breaking records, thus they disappoint? Is this a remotely fair standard?

The good thing about sports and about the NBA is that all that matters -- all that really matters in the grand narrative that survives time and memory -- is what happens in the playoffs. Cleveland doesn't have a cakewalk to the Finals, but neither do the Warriors or Spurs.

As LeBron himself knows all too well, once you're in the Finals, regular season standings mean nothing. The Mavericks taught him that lesson, and it stung. Perhaps he can impart the same knowledge on the new wave of superstars. Perhaps he can be the grizzled old star drinking champagne and Steph Curry or Kawhi Leonard's salty tears in June. As the great philosopher Kevin Garnett once screamed, anything is possible.

So long as that maxim holds true, perhaps we shouldn't bury LeBron or his Cavaliers just yet.





READY2RIDE
 
Few more games left and the Run will begin. Bron-Bron back to his normal self, looking like the best player in the league.
 
Two weeks ago, Lue pulled LeBron James aside and, in so many words, told him to knock off the funny business and focus on the basketball.

It came after James' cryptic social media behavior, on-court fraternization with Dwyane Wade and off-court comments about teaming up with Wade and Carmelo Anthony and not, you know, his current teammates.

Only James and Lue know exactly how this message was relayed, but it has become clear that it was received.

http://espn.go.com/blog/cleveland-c...ietly-makes-statement-with-handling-of-lebron


Look at Coach Lue doing the job he was brought in for... We're looking sharp as if we're locking in on the Playoffs and I couldn't be happier. Glad to put the funny business behind us
 
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We've got the 1 seed tied up right?

Toronto wins the tie break but we'd have to lose 2 of 3 and the Raptors would have to win all 3 for that to matter.

Chicago, Atlanta and Detroit? Should manage that.
 
Prolly Play Lebron Saturday, then rest him till playoffs. That should be enough to lock up the 1 seed.
 
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Yeah we got the #1 seed.

Playoffs start on April 16th which is on a Saturday.

My guess is that game 1 for us will be on Sunday. I'd say 3:30... I have no proof that is going to happen but just my opinion.

Cant wait man.
 
I can't believe there are only 3 games to go. Ready though.

I'd like a few challenges to sharpen us up - no 7 game series' though!

I'm looking forward to a Spurs/Warriors series too.
 
i think some of it is staged but u can def tell the ones that are genuine, dude's expression ordering the spicy sauce is priceless



LeBron James Is Underrated and Overlooked

GQ MAGAZINE


BY BETHLEHEM SHOALS
April 7, 2016

During last year’s Finals, basketball overlord LeBron James played the underdog for the first time in his career. Instead of a fully optimized basketball cyborg, we got a more compelling—if far less attractive—LeBron James, one whose herky-jerky moves in the paint and brute drives to the basket belonged to a crafty vet, not a freak athlete. Leading an undermanned and overmatched Cavaliers team against the high-octane Warriors, James came mighty close to pulling off an upset.
It was a remarkable glimpse into what the future holds for LeBron James, whose prime is winding down and who will have to retool his game in a way that accepts new limitations. What’s more, while the two chips in Miami cemented his reputation as an all-timer, James’s prophetic return to Cleveland reset expectations. He’s determined to follow through on this promise to finally bring a championship to the most losing-est city in sports.
Yet between the sheer might of the West and James’s brushes with mortality, the clock is most certainly ticking. You couldn’t ask for a richer narrative. So the question is, why do so few people seem to care?

Maybe we’ve just gotten used to taking LeBron James for granted. James himself has long been the game’s great inevitability. From the moment he came into the league, his superstardom seemed all but assured. It was just a matter of time before he eventually won a title. And his game, which was so expansive and flamboyant in his early years, evolved into a highly strategic attack that allows him to leverage his vast skill set while taking very few risks.

This season has been different. James, now 31, relies less on sheer explosiveness and often wills his way, rather than dances, to the basket. But there’s nothing melancholic about this. We’re seeing LeBron 3.0 emerge before our very eyes. And so far, he’s been effective as ever. The Cavs sit atop the Eastern Conference at 56–22, on pace for more wins than last year, more wins than LeBron had in three of his four seasons in Miami. They’re pretty much a lock to make the Finals again, despite nettlesome distractions like David Blatt’s firing and some wacky business around LeBron’s social-media accounts.

The unstinting success might actually be part of the problem: You’d never know it from looking at LeBron’s box scores, or the team’s record, that James is changing on the fly and the Cavs are under such intense scrutiny. The output is the same, which makes the novelty factor still practically nonexistent. Compare this to the cosmic ascent of Stephen Curry and the Warriors, or a Spurs season that’s historic in its own right, and LeBron’s near-invisibility makes sense.

Of course, this depends a lot on your vantage point. The basketball cognoscenti is certainly checking for LeBron and the Cavs, if nothing else because—as they proved in last year’s Finals—they’re one of the few teams capable of making the Warriors play on their terms. There’s a big difference, though, between a sense of obligation and sincere interest. The young LeBron James was the most dynamic player in the sport; in Miami, the evolution of his game and the hype surrounding that team made him the focal point of the league. Even last season, the return to Cleveland and adjustment to a new team and coach ensured that LeBron James stayed in the forefront of basketball consciousness. This year, he’s just part of the landscape.

We shouldn’t expect this to change until James and the Cavs square off against whoever comes out of the West. Cleveland should cruise through the playoffs until the Finals; given how exhausted LeBron was by that point last year, it wouldn’t be surprising if Tyronn Lue closely monitored his star player’s minutes. If the Cavs drop a few games along the way, we’ll shrug and blame the length of playoff series or chalk it up to James taking it easy.

Nothing Cleveland does will even register until they’re actually playing for a title. Contrast this with the West, where the Spurs and the Thunder will likely face each other in the second round. For the next month or so, the East will continue to be an afterthought. James might still be the most complete player in the game, but he’s also going to have to spend another postseason beating up on inferior competition. (Unless, of course, you’re convinced that the Raptors can knock off the Cavs, which you probably shouldn’t be.)

With luck, though, we’ll all rediscover LeBron James with a vengeance in a couple months. A rematch with the Warriors, even mightier this time around, would follow the perfect script. Going up against the Spurs would give James a chance to flex his still formidable basketball IQ—an overused phrase that applies singularly to LeBron, not least because he relies on it now more than ever. And if the Thunder manages to make it that far, we’ll finally see James go head-to-head again with Kevin Durant—who still very much belongs in the debates about the league’s best player.

All this will happen against the backdrop of James’s evolution and Cleveland’s dreams. This is what LeBron’s season has been building to. It’s the moment when, if we’re smart, we’ll wake up and start paying attention again.
 
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