After a long NBA season and a mostly underwhelming playoffs, Warriors/Cavaliers III is finally here. The playoff series the basketball world has waited a year for is ready to tip off, and fans are hoping for an exciting Finals to make up for what could be described as an auto-sim of the early-round playoff matchups.
We’ve used NBA 2K17 to tell us what will happen in each game of the Conference Finals, so why stop now? Let’s see what the silicon gods say will happen when LeBron James takes on the Warriors for a third straight Finals.
Here’s the full simulation we ran on our Facebook page, if you’d like to play it all out. Let’s get to the results.
Two big 30-point games stand out here, with Curry getting a tidy 34 and 10 assist performance to lead Golden State. The breakout stat here is a 30-point night from Klay Thompson, who has had a down postseason both in NBA 2K17 and real life.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, LeBron James is your leading scorer for the Cavaliers. He put up 30 as well, and Kyrie Irving had 23 and five assists. He wasn’t great from beyond the arc, though, with just three makes on 13 attempts. Kevin Love, meanwhile, had a nice double-double, with 11 points and 12 rebounds to go with three assists.
Would you look at that: a Game 1 blowout. It’s probably coming from the team you’d most expect to put on a performance like that, and giving up 130 is alarming for a Cavaliers team that has struggled to defend at times. The biggest lead for Golden State was 34 in this one, which means this one kept getting away from Cleveland in the game’s final minutes.
The shot chart shows all those missed threes from Irving, which were probably symptomatic of trying to come back as the game slipped away. No matter how you slice it, it’s a rough night for the Cavaliers, who clearly have some defensive work to do in the paint in the coming games.
That’s a lot of blues and grays for the Cavaliers on the shooting chart, which means there’s also room for improvement as far as their shooting percentage all over the court. Even just outside the key they missed a lot of shots, something that can’t happen for the virtual Cavaliers if they’re going to let virtual Golden State shoot like that.
Let’s see who got the game’s coveted MVP award.
Steph Curry took the honors with his 34 points, 2 rebounds, and 10 assists on the night. Well-deserved. Let’s see if what happens in real life mirrors the simulation, or if the real LeBron and Kyrie can defend a bit better than their virtual counterparts.
