UNSTOPPABLE
Cavs hang around, but can’t solve Durant as Warriors one win away from championship
CLEVELAND — Playing the role of LeBron James on Wednesday night was Kevin Durant.
In a game in which Durant was forced to shoulder much of the scoring load because his teammates couldn’t shoot, and LeBron James was his usual self but got major contributions from the guys who had done very little in Oakland, it was the Golden State Warriors who outlasted the Cleveland Cavaliers by a 110-102 score. Durant hit an absurdly long three-pointer with less than a minute left to give Golden State a six-point lead, part of his 43-point, 13-rebound performance. It was eerily reminiscent of the three-point bomb he hit in the face of James in Game 3 of last year’s finals which, like this one, gave the Warriors a daunting 3-0 series lead.
Steph Curry missed his first nine three-point attempts, but hit a big one late, and finished with just 11 points. No one other than Durant had more than 11 points for the Warriors.
James, meanwhile, had 33 points, 11 assists and 10 rebounds. He got 10 points from Kevin Love and a surprise 15 from Rodney Hood, who had just nine points in the last eight Cavs games, but it was not enough to fend off Durant’s brilliance.
Cleveland did what it had been saying it would do for two days — come out better on home court — and the Cavs led for the entire first half, thanks in part to terrible shooting from the Warriors. After Golden State had raced out to a 2-0 lead in the NBA Finals, it looked like the Cavs would need either a hot shooting night or for the Warriors to suddenly go cold from deep. They got a little of both.
But the Warriors fought back into it, with Durant hitting a variety of impossible-to-defend jumpers, and it was a one-point game with six minutes to go.
For a Torontobased sports writer, it is an odd feeling to come to Cleveland and see the home team as heavy underdogs. The Raptors have made four trips to the south shore of Lake Erie in the past three years, and they are a smooth 0-7 over that time. (Throw in the Blue Jays and the American League Championship Series two years ago, and Toronto is 0-10 against Cleveland in the recent post-season.)
The Raptors’ oh-fer here doesn’t even quite explain the level of dominance. Three of the Cavs’ wins over them in this arena have been by more than 30 points and in only one of them was the margin of victory less than nine. That one might have been the most painful of all — Game 3 of the East semis this year, when the Raptors fought back to tie the game late and then watched as LeBron hit a running, onelegged floater off the glass to basically rip the Raptors’ hearts out and probably cost their coach his job. What the Raptors have seen up close is that in this arena, where they had won eight straight in the playoffs this season, the Cavaliers can be a nightmare: James orchestrating it all, as he does, but also an array of shooters who can light up the scoreboard from three-point range.
If Cleveland was going to make this a series, that was the team that needed to show up on Wednesday night.
From the outset of Game 3, these indeed looked like different Cavaliers. Kevin Love drilled a tone-setting threepointer on the first possession, sending the crowd into fits, and J.R. Smith, who most definitely did not enjoy his trip to Oakland, hit one soon thereafter. Cleveland jumped out to a 10-point lead in the first four minutes, proving once again the somewhat bizarre fact that NBA teams have a habit of hitting a lot more open shots on their home court. The rims are supposed to be the same, but the results are quite different.
Before the game, Cavs coach Tyronn Lue was asked to explain the home-road discrepancy.
“I guess because you are comfortable,” he said. “You play more games at home than you do on the road as far as in certain arenas.” Factually accurate.
One thing was the same in the early-going: James was a monster, with six points and five assists in the first quarter, punctuated by the off-thebackboard dunk that is normally only attempted in an all-star game or a dunk contest.
By the time the first half ended with Cleveland up by six, the Warriors had chipped away at big Cavaliers leads twice, thanks mostly to Durant, who had 24 points in the half. He picked the right time to be dominant, since Steph Curry and Klay Thompson shot a combined 3-for-15 in the first half. Durant was 3-for-4 on threepointers, the rest of his team was 1-for-10 from distance in the half. It is a hell of a luxury to have Durant on a team that had already won a title one year and 73 games the next.
The Warriors promptly erased that six-point deficit when the second half opened, tying the game after less than two minutes of game time.
The Quicken Loans Arena crowd got decidedly nervous, and it was tough to blame them.