NBA Finals
The star power illuminates the NBA universe. Future Hall of Famers. Seven MVP awards. Eleven current or former All-Stars. Eight All-NBA performers. The biggest names in the league. LeBron James. Stephen Curry. Kyrie Irving. Klay Thompson. Kevin Love. Kevin Durant. Draymond Green.
“When the best players have to face each other to prove who is better, there are a lot of intense emotions as well as calculations going on,” Hall of Famer and former Lakers great Kareem AbdulJabbar told USA TODAY via e-mail. “Rivalries engage the whole player, demanding that he or she rise to their best level — maybe even a little beyond.”
The abundant story lines fill the demand for content:
— James playing in his seventh consecutive Finals, joining a small group of Celtics from the 1950s and ‘60s to accomplish that feat. “I never really talk about my legacy,” James said. “I kind of just live in the moment, and if I’m able to accomplish something, then it kind of adds to it on its own.”
— Durant’s quest for his first title. “Just approach basketball like I always have, which is with love and care and hard work, and we’ll see what happens,” he said.
— Warriors coach Steve Kerr’s health-related absence. “At the end of the day this is his team,” said Warriors acting head coach Mike Brown, who had two previous stints as the coach of the Cavs and knows James well.
— Curry’s chance to rebound from last season’s crushing Finals loss. “I don’t want to feel what I felt last year,” he said.
— Green trying to make amends for his Game 5 suspension in 2016. “The thing that it taught me is it’s put me in the position of where I am today,” he said.
The Warriors are 12-0 and the Cavaliers 12-1 in this postseason, entering the Finals with the best combined winning percentage since the NBA expanded the playoffs to 16 teams in 1984.
It is the matchup most NBA experts predicted, and the one many fans — despite allegiance to other teams — are eager to watch. As many as 30 million people in the USA and millions more around the world will tune in to series based on the last season’s Finals ratings.
“We also understand that this is just as an exciting matchup for everyone else as it is for us,” Irving said. “You got to take it as that. You got to relish in the competition and the players that we’re going against. This is what everyone wants to see and this what we all want to be a part of. So, I’ve been waiting.”
The familiarity, the competition, the moments, the great plays, the success, the failing short, the meaning and significance add to the intrigue of a third series between the teams.
Hall of Famers and Lakers great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played the Sixers and Celtics in consecutive Finals in the 1980s. He wanted a third consecutive matchup, especially against the Celtics, but that never happened.
“Before we beat them in 1985, the Lakers were 0-8 against the Celtics in the finals,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in an email. “That year we beat them handily 4-2 and I felt we were playing so well, so smoothly that we could have just kept beating them.”
Given the players under contract for both teams for the next few seasons, it’s possible Cleveland and Golden State play in the finals a couple of more times.
But for now, they enter the Finals with different pressures.
The Warriors find themselves at a fascinating fork in the road, with a potential dynasty awaiting them down one path and another year of infamy down the other.
A win would serve two purposes, not only avenging the 2016 loss in which they became the first team in NBA history to collapse after leading 3-1 in the Finals but also completing the goal they talked about last July when they met inside a mansion in the Hamptons to recruit Durant.
Durant wasn’t sure at first, concerned about the prospect of being deemed the NBA’s top villain and also of the question of whether he would fit.
The Warriors had made history without him by winning 73 regular-season games. So why, he thought, would they have any desire to share this spotlight? The answer, then and now, had everything to do with this Finals moment that awaits them.