Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Live to fight another day
Cavs still facing uphill battle but refuse to roll over
CLEVELAND — Go ahead, back them into a corner. Call them names. Write them off. The Cavaliers don’t care. For the fourth time in two years, they fought off elimination in the NBA Finals by winning just when it appeared as if their season was over.
On Friday night, the Cavaliers turned anger over some comments made by motor-mouthed Warriors forward Draymond Green into energy and their best performance this season. They broke scoring records in a 137-116 win that shoved this “Three-match” between new-school rivals to the West Coast for Game 5 on Monday.
And while most teams would prefer to not live on the edge, the Cavaliers seem to thrive there. The only team to come back from a 3-1 deficit in the finals, LeBron James and his buddies are basketball’s highwire, high-risk act with no net to break their fall.
It’s dangerous and not for the faint of heart.
“I don’t like it,” James said, drawing laughter after surpassing Magic Johnson in the record book with his ninth finals triple-double. “It causes too much stress, man. I’m stressed out.
“(We) keep doing this every year. But listen, we just got some resilient guys.”
The Cavaliers are still alive and have a chance to do what no other team has ever done in the NBA playoffs: rally from a 3-0 deficit.
It’s been done on big stages in other sports, perhaps most famously by the 2004 Red Sox, who strung together four wins over the Yankees to win the American League pennant on the way to their first World Series title since 1918.
But in the 126 instances in which NBA teams have fallen behind 3-0, none has recovered to win the series. Zero.
Maybe these chaotic Cavaliers are just the team to do it.
“We have been in this situation before,” said Kevin Love, who made 6 of 8 3-pointers and scored 23 points in Game 4. “Every year’s different, every playoff series, every game, but we just are a team that never count ourselves out.
“We feel any game we have a great game plan and expect to win. But we just continue to have that fire, continue to be resilient.”
There doesn’t seem to be anything that rattles the Cavaliers, so it should be no surprise that on the verge of being swept by a Warriors team James called a “juggernaut” and “beast” before the finals began, they dug down deep again.
Kyrie Irving knocked down seven of the Cavaliers’ 24 3-pointers — one of their three finals scoring records — and had 40 points as they stopped the Warriors’ 15-game postseason winning streak and lived to see another game.
The All-Star point guard can’t explain the defending champions’ ability to bounce back.
“Every game is do or die, and we understand that,” he said. “We’re ready to live in it.”
On Thursday, Green, whose suspension from last year’s Game 5 for hitting James in the groin helped swing the series to the Cavaliers, said he was looking forward to celebrating on their home floor for the second time in three years.
And while the comments didn’t come across as excessively brash, especially given that they came from Green, Irving said the Cavaliers were offended and inspired by them.
“It’s part of the game,” he said. “But you add some chatter in there and that adds extra motivation.”