As the Cavs enter the precipice of a second-straight NBA Finals loss to the Golden State Warriors, down 3-1 (which, as history tells us, is a comeback no team has ever made – especially not one playing a team as historically good as the Warriors) and heading back to Oakland, there are a lot of angles to take when discussing this series from Cleveland’s perspective. You’ll hear the rumblings about blowing up the team, and Kevin Love’s future, and LeBron’s culpability having chosen said team, and coaching, and iso ball, and James not being the player he once was. All of these columns are being written, have been written, and have always been written depending on what plane of existence you’re on and which universe you are living in at this very moment.
That’s all well and good. Those things are likely being written by writers who are good at making words happen, and you should read those things. We are not writing that, though.
I am a Cleveland native who spent the past few days in and around Northeast Ohio, from the Flats to Gordon Square, from a Solon bowling alley to a house near Kent, discussing the impact of this forthcoming loss on the Cavs, and the sports landscape as a whole.
For Golden State, history is easy. One more win gives them the greatest single season in NBA history, and crowns them with the title of DYNASTY, which doesn’t get thrown around all that often these days.
The Cavs are trickier.
What do you do with a team that was good enough to get to the NBA Finals twice and ran into injuries in year one, and a buzzsaw in year two? How do you describe a team that, if it stands pat, most likely is good enough to get to the Finals for at least a couple more seasons, and will probably run into Golden State again, and will probably lose? Well, I did the best thing I could do. I looked for someone else who has been in a similar spot, coming so close over and over again and understanding the Groundhog Day eternal struggle that is sports disparity. I decided to bring in a Bills fan, DIME managing editor Spencer Lund.
Spencer, do you have any sage wisdom or perspective here? I’m looking for answers, and that’s why I didn’t just write a CLEVELAND feature on my own following Game 4.
Spencer: Hello. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Also, Bills fan. For the record, Woj wasn’t the reason for this, because the Cavs are like the 1990 Bills, except if Thurman Thomas were also the best damn two-way QB in history and a weird Bruce Smith-Cornelius Bennett hybrid (in this hypothetical, Matthew Dellavedova isn’t Steve Tasker, sorry). LeBron has no NFL analogy. He’s just LeBron.
But the suffering that Cleveland fans are currently experiencing… again… that’s what being a Bills fan is all about. That’s a feeling we get. It’s a feeling the whole rust belt can understand. It’s an inferiority thing, too. We’re just naturally leery of hubris now. We don’t exalt in wins. We don’t fall apart at losses because losses are just life for us.
Those four years shaped me as a fan, in ways I’m still coming to grips with. At what age are you most devoted to your favorite team? For me, it was when I was around 7 until puberty, when girls — and other things, but mostly girls — started to matter more. In that time frame, I got to watch Michael Jordan win titles for a team I didn’t care about as my Old Man preached the gospel of Bill Russell, and while an all-enveloping melancholy washed over an entire region of New York state four-consecutive winters in a row.
Martin, let’s tell the people about what this despair feels like, even though there’s a glimmer of a miracle in the form of Draymond’s Game 5 suspension.
Martin: Where do I start? For Clevelanders, it isn’t so much the crippling depression that the national media likes to paint it as. People in Cleveland aren’t holding their heads in their hands, crying, staring into the abyss. Their happiness isn’t directly tied to their sports teams the way documentaries and helicoptering-in sweeping narratives would have you believe. Instead the despair is a phantom limb, the loss of a long-term relationship you thought was really going to be your “Til Death Do Us Part.” It still pops up, at random and often inopportune times. You think about it in the car, when you’re all alone, even some days when you’re in the middle of a great day, laughing and spending time with the people closest to you. The hurt is real, and it never really goes away, but it’s a part of you, and you’re at peace with that in some weird way. It’s something inside every Cleveland sports fan, and I imagine Buffalo is no different.
You hit on something here, Spencer, that I’ve mentioned a bunch, and I heard a lot of people from Cleveland mentioning following the Game 4 loss. There is no hubris. Even when LeBron came back, there was no expectation that championships were a guarantee or a given. Sure, you have the fans who break the mold and talk smack, the same way you have your jersey burners and your utterly chagrined “jump off the I-480 bridge” folks who call into talk radio, but the majority of people never get too high or too low. The impending sense of doom, as Waiting For Next Year writer Ben Cox always tweets about, is always around the corner the same way death is always in the back of the minds of those of us who are obsessed with our own mortality.
But it’s never really the end, even when things do fall apart – because it’s just a loss. Losses happen. Factories close. Buildings are torn down.
The funny thing? When the TV trucks and bright lights are gone, people move on with their lives. They just wear yet another sports failure as a tattoo. It’s a Memento reminder of what happened, a tick mark in the ledger until another season starts. The Misery Index®™ of Cleveland fanhood isn’t on a loop like some sort of flagellation, even if it’s a cheap and expected production tactic whenever that lingering doom decides to drop the guillotine. Curses be damned, it’s all just chance. And unfortunately, the dice roll the Cavs threw after James returned came up snake eyes in the form of the Warriors.
My question for a Bills fan is one I’ve grappled with a bit more than I expected to. How do you view those Super Bowl teams? Are they failures for never having finished the job, or are they to be celebrated for being that good for a sustained period of time in the first place? I’m just trying to figure out what I need to brace myself for here.
Spencer: The media will cover it in cycles. Unfortunately, the first one always involves diction that requires a Heimlich maneuver. But, like the way history is often revised over time, particularly by those in power, you begin to think you’re tougher for having gone through it. Eventually, you’ll get a 30 for 30 and everyone will acknowledge your team’s excellence before it again becomes a footnote or the answer at trivia night.
Nothing can be worse than the feeling I had as a 10-year-old watching my Bills get whooped by the Cowboys. That sense of impending dread will still be sitting there in a tiny crevice of your brain, and it’ll cloud all future sports endeavors. But it also calcifies your sports fandom. It happened to me at an impressionable age, but as I’ve gotten older, their stretch of 7-9 seasons, poor draft picks and no playoff berth in sight is almost funny now. Sure, we haven’t made the playoffs since I was in high school, and even then it was to lose via Music City Miracle, but I can laugh about it because there are way more important things to worry about.
Now I look at those ’90 to ’93 teams with a mixture of awe and pride. Four-straight! That last one especially was so hard. Even people in my area were rooting against them. The hurt was that palpable. But they did it again! Retroactively, you appreciate how hard it all was, and you think “what if” all the time. But pride replaces embarrassment over a decade.
And the LeBron Cavs will get more chances. The East is so stunted, and James is just that good.
Yes, they ran into a historic team, again. But, if my Bills fandom is any indication, you’ll look back at this year with fondness in the future, I think. You’ll look back on the 10-0 start to the playoffs and that Game 6 closeout in Toronto and you’ll appreciate how good LeBron’s self-made team really is.
The Warriors are just better. So were the Cowboys.
Martin: There’s all this discussion of the Cavs changing who they are to try and beat the Warriors. Trade Kevin Love for some Celtics. Trade Kyrie Irving for Chris Paul. Hire Blatt, Fire Blatt, Hire Lue, Fire Lue, Hire … Mike Brown again? But so much of that feels like chasing a ghost. You’re never going to beat the Warriors doing what the Warriors do because the Warriors have a set identity. They are who they are. Searching for bit parts to try and miraculously play that way seems like a fool’s errand, and discounts the fact that what the Cavs have on its own is good enough to beat everybody but the Spurs and Thunder and Warriors, and maybe even the Spurs and Thunder depending on how the series shakes out.
The alternative is what is scarier, though. And that’s just waiting around and hoping something goes wrong for Golden State. Maybe they really are worse if Festus Ezeli and Harrison Barnes are gone. Or Shaun Livingston and Andre Iguodala and Andrew Bogut fall off. Or heaven forbid, there’s an injury or prolonged slump to Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, or Draymond Green. That doesn’t seem like a way to live, and live your best life, especially when things like that could easily happen to the Cavs too, and LeBron’s clock is ticking too.
At some point when a person throws big bets on red, loses, puts even bigger bets on red, and loses, and goes back to the ATM, you do have to say enough is enough, right? Sure, it’ll stop coming up black eventually. Not before the losses pile up, though. And there’s no guarantee of when.
The Cavs making a bunch of Finals would be celebrated, and remembered fondly. But the last thing a Cleveland sports fan needs is another 30 for 30. He or she needs a championship. I think that’s why this one is harder to rectify than a lot of the others. And why it stands alone relative to all the “curse” moments. There is no curse here. The Cavs built a team that would have won a title in a bunch of other years. Like you said, the Warriors are just better.
So what is the coping mechanism when a team is “just better?” And how do you react to that?
Spencer: Graciously, one would hope. The Bills were better than the Giants and (perhaps) the Washington football team in their first two Super Bowl losses, and those losses were still really tough to handle. But the ‘Boys were better in the last two Super Bowl matchups, even though we had a lead at halftime in that last one. Those were easier to understand and the mourning period was shorter. When the team is better, the loss is significantly more palatable.
But I get that Cleveland needs a title more than it needs another 30 for 30. Except, your diction gives you away a little bit. You’re gonna suffer even more if you think your city “needs” a title. Cleveland needs better schools, a swollen middle class and a better trained and more empathetic police force, just like all rust belt cities. It’s that line of thinking that’ll help the most, too.
We wrote these on a day when both of us were simultaneously trying to make sense of the tragedy in Orlando. When you step back from the team and the series, it can be like one of those Magic Eye pictures that only comes into focus as you step further way. Those Bills losses still hurt today, but the perspective has shifted as I’ve gotten further away from them. I don’t have other sports teams to rely on and we haven’t been in the playoffs since 2001, but that doesn’t matter. I look back on them with pride now more so than anger or sadness.
And, more importantly, I’m happy as a sports fan. And when I watch them at the NYC Bills bar, I’m still happy. Yes, the most excited I’ve gotten about them was a random regular season win over New England a couple years back, but happiness is happiness. You don’t need to couch it in any more context.
The Cavs are likely losing to the better team this year. As a fan, you ride with them until the end, and then you pick yourself up and get ready to do it again. It’s a grind for the fans, as well as the players. You bleed with them so when the day does come when they finally get over the hump, and I really do think it’ll happen in the LeBron era, the joy and relief washing over you will be magnified that much more. Even if it never comes, and the task of rooting for them becomes Sisyphean in nature, I promise you you’re still gonna look back on all the good and bad times with fondness.
It’s corny to think about, but if the Bills ever win a Super Bowl in my lifetime (not a given at all), it’ll be that much sweeter because of what all of our fans have been through. You have that same luxury. The key is thinking of it in those terms without downplaying your suffering, either.
You’re a Cavs fan and that’s calcified now, so you’re even stronger — like the callous on a skinned knee. You could even handle a Cavs comeback that falls short in a Game 7.
You can handle anything; you’re a Cavs fan.
Martin: I think you just wrote the new team slogan. “All For One” is pretty good, but “You Can Handle Anything; You’re A Cavs Fan” is really a lot more apt. I’ll start floating that to the appropriate parties.
