There are some games in sports that make you ask, "Did all of that really just happen?” Sunday night's Game 2 of the NBA Finals, a 95-93 overtime win by Cleveland at Golden State, was certainly one of those games.
Let's run down several of the more bizarre things.
There was Steph Curry having an unimaginably bad game, along with most of the rest of the Warriors' offense, save Klay Thompson. The frantic Warriors comeback at the end of regulation. The cringe-inducing officiating.
David Blatt's benching of an excellent Timofey Mozgov after the third quarter due to small-ball doublethink. J.R. Smith's moronic fouls. Marreese Speights' unreal blown dunk. The sloppy offense and general bricklaying from the playoffs' two most efficient offenses.
And all of this came against the subtext of the Cavs playing without Kyrie Irving, out for the rest of the playoffs with a broken kneecap.
Despite everything, the fact is that the NBA title is still up for grabs, and an improbable question must be asked as Cleveland goes back home: can the Cavs do the unthinkable and win the championship against the juggernaut that is the 2014-15 Warriors?
The very simple answer is that if they play defense and rebound like they did in Game 2 against Golden State, absolutely anything is possible, including a five-game series win.
But logically and realistically, games where the Warriors score just over 0.9 points per possession, get dominated on the glass and have their starters shoot a mere 38 percent from the floor, including Klay Thompson's excellent game, are not going to grow on trees.
At this stage in playoffs, if you've been watching the whole way through, you might be inclined to say that Cleveland's defense is a known, great quantity that very well could be strong enough to take home a championship after being somewhat pedestrian through the regular season. But Golden State's performance on offense in Game 2 was its worst of the playoffs, even weaker than Games 2 and 3 against Memphis.
Some of the shots the Warriors missed, even the contested outside jumpers, were ones that fall at an above-league average clip, and have through a not-so-trivial sample size of 98 games before Sunday. Where Cleveland actually shot worse than Golden State in Game 2, the Cavs' 38 percent effective field goal percentage feels like a more accurate result due to the limited offensive firepower Cleveland has outside of LeBron James.
There's also the issue of depth. Cleveland was relatively fresh due to the extra off day between Games 1 and 2, but due to injuries, the Cavs are now down to a seven-man rotation, several of whom are extremely limited on offense or just playing awful basketball on that end of the floor.
The Cavs do have few more-sustainable factors going for them in this series. One is that they're absolutely controlling tempo and not letting Golden State kill them in transition. Both games so far this series have been in the 90-possession range, right around Cleveland's playoff average. Without Irving and Kevin Love, they need this series to be a grind-out, late-'90s style of basketball.
The other is that Cleveland is doing a fantastic job on the glass, with the offensive rebounding of Tristan Thompson and Mozgov being a particular strength.
All rebounding is of course crucial, and the Cavs are doing an excellent job on the defensive glass as well, but the domination on the offensive glass in these playoffs by Cleveland means so much against Golden State. When Thompson and Mozgov can stay at home on missed Cavs shots, and rebound a fair number of them, it frees the other players to get back in transition and prevent Warriors run-outs.
And of course, the Cavs have the best player in the world on their team. While a lot was written in the first half of the season about how LeBron was perhaps past his peak due to the wear-and-tear on his body throughout four straight years of playing close or more than 100 games each years plus Olympics, that all seems to have been put to rest over the past four months or so, and especially in these playoffs.
So far in the first two Finals games, LeBron looks about as physically powerful as he was at his 2011-13 Miami peak, and is finding more ways than ever to carry the rest of his supporting cast. Sure, you want him to shoot better than 11-of-34, but you really can't do much better than scoring or assisting 22 of your team's 29 baskets in a Finals game against the league's best defense.
While thinking about all-time historical placement can be an absolutely exercise in futility and devolve into lowest-common-denominator garbage, you can't help but think about what this undermanned title could do for LeBron's legacy.
By the time he retires, LeBron will go down as the greatest small forward ever. A title this year, with a seven-man rotation for the balance of the Finals and missing two All-Stars, would immediately vault him to that title and cement him as an indisputable top-five player ever should he never dribble a ball again. I'll let Twitter, Facebook, and ESPN shows I don't watch bring up the impossible Michael Jordan comparisons.
But we're at least a week from those hypotheticals coming to fruition. A Cleveland title, even with home-court advantage now on its side, still looks like the unlikelier proposition. Yet, it's at least a conversation as the series shifts to Quicken Loans Arena, and not too many people would have believed that on Sunday afternoon.
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