CLEVELAND – Picture a casino floor. There’s hazy smoke throughout even though you’re pretty sure you passed at least five No Smoking signs. There’s no true north, only the not-so-subtle noises of a thousand talking children’s toys going off at the same time. Color does not exist despite it being everywhere and in everything.
At a blackjack table on the right, the eight people seated are excited. Seemingly every hand is hot, and this is one of those streaks where anything seems possible. In a snap, it’s gone. One by one, those at the table exit; a lone figure remains sitting, nursing a plastic cup filled with four fingers of some sort of brown liquor. His stack dwindles, down to two $20 chips, and he gets up. “How could this happen?” he asks to nobody in particular, least of all the dealer, who wouldn’t acknowledge him at this point anyway. “We couldn’t lose a minute ago.”
He takes six steps away from the table, pauses, and flips his remaining chips in his hand before turning around and sitting back down. The house might always win, but you never truly know until you’ve lost every chip you can play.
The odds are as stacked for Golden State as they can be after Thursday night’s 103-82 win, and while it’s still possible for the Cleveland Cavaliers to pull this series out with a 2-2 tie headed back to Oracle Arena on Sunday, the Cavs only have a few hands left. What they make of them depends on what they have left in the hole and what the dealer is showing.
Steve Kerr made his play in Game 4, going ‘liar’ in his somewhat secret lineup change from Andrew Bogut to Andre Iguodala that opened the floor and got the tempo back to where the Warriors wanted it against the Cavaliers. And the cards that Cleveland played were trash; the combination of Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith, Matthew Dellavedova and James Jones combined to shoot 7-of-38 (including Smith’s abysmal 0-of-8 from deep).
To win four games in this series, Cleveland always needed LeBron James to go full übermensch. Through Game 3, he was up to the challenge, averaging 41 points, 12 rebounds and 8.3 assists (but more important, giving the Cavs a series lead and chance to win in all three contests). Anything less than that was like sticking the rest of the roster in the Hunger Games arena (one of LeBron’s favorite reads) and asking them to fight each other to the death with those foam bats you use in therapy.
And that was exactly what happened Thursday. James became mortal, scoring 20 points on 7-of-22 shooting (including zero in the fourth quarter), looking completely exhausted by the end. David Blatt tried to steal a few minutes of rest at the beginning of the fourth, but the Warriors pounced with Stephen Curry left in the game, and by the time James came back in, the game was all but over.
“He’s a human being,” Blatt said Thursday, “and I’ve got to give him a minute here or there. If I don’t, I’m really going to put him under more duress than he already is.”
That’s exactly the problem. LeBron James is a human being, and the Cavaliers need him to be more than that to win the Championship with the roster as constructed right now. All over Cleveland, sports talk following the game, people were grasping for answers or ways to fix this – with most people singling out the “go deeper down the bench” magic bullet that doesn’t actually exist; if there was anyone left who could help the Cavs, they’d be playing right now – but the answer is simple: LeBron James. Either they get two (or three) more otherworldly performances out of him, or this Finals run is over.
If anything, James’ regression to the mean (which for him still means close to a triple-double) might have been an even bigger rallying cry for the Warriors than the success of the small-ball lineup, the steady play of Iguodala or the regained confidence of Draymond Green. It’s the Predator “if it bleeds, we can kill it” philosophy, and LeBron literally bled on Thursday night after smashing into a camera following a Bogut foul with 4:43 left in the first half.
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“I was just trying to regain my composure,” James said after the game, “and I was holding my head. It was hurting. I was just hoping I wasn’t bleeding. But obviously the camera cut me pretty bad. Our medical staff did a great job of stopping the bleeding.”
James tried to play it off, going full chill mode in the press conference in a white shirt and black hat (which conveniently hid the stitches he got after the game). But no matter how many jokes he made or how loosely he held the mic in his hand at the podium, the point was made: LeBron James is no apparition. LeBron James is no myth. He exists in the corporeal form like everyone else.
That perhaps speaks to why guys like Green were so chatty after the game. Not only did the adjustment work, but any fear of whispering LeBron James in the mirror five times and seeing him pop up behind them went away the second the blood hit the floor.
“LeBron is having to shoulder a lot of the load,” Green said. “So you just want to continue to try to wear them down, wear them down, and we were able to do that tonight. Pushing the tempo, that was able to wear them down a little bit more. So they made that comeback, and I think they just ran out of gas. That’s what’s been the game plan.”
Former NC State head coach Jim Valvano used to say, “Every day ordinary people do extraordinary things,” and LeBron James is far from ordinary. But he is human. James and the Cavaliers will need to do far better than Thursday’s ordinary night if they have any hope of keeping pace with Golden State the rest of the way.
