In case you thought you weren’t interested in the latest installment of Cavs-Warriors, here’s what you missed Thursday night in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. You missed Atlas put the world on his back. Cleveland is the world if you talk to a Cleveland sports fan, and LeBron James is its stone-bearing Titan, even if you talk to a guide from Patagonia.
And you missed him try to fight Thanos.
Now, Thanos is a forced, misaligned way to continue this metaphor, because Marvel has never crossed paths with Greek mythology (yet). But for this: LeBron is to Earth what Golden State is to the basketball universe—indomitable, supreme—
and a Warrior who was around for the start of this championship run may well end up with as many rings as there are infinity stones at this rate.
It started in 2015, when Warriors-Cavaliers I ended with Golden State victorious after LeBron, the GOAT—that’s “greatest of all-time,” or a goat emoji, which is the only graphical way to represent him via text—enlisted the previously unknown Matthew Dellavedova to be his unlikely deputy after losing Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving to injuries. Those two were Cleveland’s second- and third-best players. But James and Dellavedova somehow stretched the affair to a classic six-game series.
Then came 2016 for Warriors-Cavaliers II: the rematch, the one in which 73-win Golden State (the best regular-season team ever) was practically assured of a repeat title against 57-win Cleveland, until the Cavs ripped off three straight victories to complete the biggest upset in NBA Finals lore, highlighted by LeBron going all Chuck Yeager from one end of the floor to the other to stuff a go-ahead layup late in Game 7 before Irving canned the championship-winning three pointer with less than a minute left.
The sentence about 2017 won’t take as long: Warriors-Cavaliers III, the rubber match, ended with a gentleman’s sweep in favor of Golden State, 4-1, after the Warriors added Kevin Durant, one of the NBA’s top three players and a generational talent—one of his nicknames is “Durantula,” for goodness sakes—to complement another generational talent, Stephen Curry, a fellow league MVP also in his prime.
Get all this straight. Three years ago, the Cleveland Cavaliers were led by the goat emoji and a turkey sandwich emoji (“Delly”) against two tidal-wave emojis: Curry and Klay Thompson, the “Splash Brothers,” so-named because they made the best jump-shooting combo since we were doing all of this with peach baskets. Two years ago, the Splash Brothers’ better sequel lost to a worthy Cavs team whose definition of reloading was “getting the same roster from last year healthy.” One year ago, Golden State’s definition of reloading was “adding the best player in the NBA not nicknamed GOAT
to our 73-win super-team that already starred the best shooter ever (Curry), Thompson, and Draymond Green, a modern-day Dennis Rodman who rebounds a little less, shoots and passes way better, and is the ecksiest of X-factors.
Now it’s 2018 for Warriors-Cavaliers IV, the tedious final act that Vegas wagered the most predictable in 17 years. Irving, LeBron’s sidekick, left for the Boston Celtics last summer. The Warriors are hampered right now, yes—they’re missing their fifth-best player, Andre Iguodala, a good LeBron defender—but they have their top four, who represent roughly one-sixth of the league’s best 25 competitors. This series was not supposed to be close. It possibly was not supposed to be even competitive.
Then Thursday night happened. Flanked by a second-best player who missed almost all of the Cavs’ previous two games in concussion protocol (Love) and a bunch of third-best players who might not rank as the third-best players on some lottery teams, the GOAT scored 51 points on 32 shot attempts (which is efficient), grabbed eight rebounds, and dished out eight assists, to the effect of almost winning Game 1 of the Finals as 13-point underdogs on the road. There are always highlights when someone—“someone” being a class essentially of him and Michael Jordan—does something like this. But that last minute …
That last minute is when you watch this hallucination and admit it’s real, like hardwood street magic, and accept being flabbergasted. What you watch is LeBron, with 51 seconds left and his team down one, try some sort of double-clutch layup in which 6-foot-9 Warriors forward Kevon Looney challenges the shot attempt and the GOAT just kind of rests the ball on his shoulder for an extra moment during his descent and manages to release it with no propulsion from his lower body, around the hand of his defender for two points—a no-doubt basket that does not rattle around on the rim, but goes in clean. And he draws a foul and a free throw, too, of course, which he makes.
Durant tries to go over James on the other side for an answer—and because the GOAT does this stuff on both ends of the court, he draws a charge. But the officials change the call to a blocking foul and award Durant two free throws with a jaw-dropping replay review that will be debated for decades. It’s tied at 104.
Let’s go to the other end, now with 36 seconds on the clock.
The ball is inbounded at roughly quarter-court to James, who receives it just outside the three-point line. His point guard George Hill runs up from the free throw line to set a screen, seemingly to force Golden State to switch the smaller Curry, Hill’s defender, onto him, for a mismatch in a clear one-on-one scenario. But instead, he quickly declines the screen, fakes his right foot toward Hill, and then dribbles with his left hand past his mark, Durant, to the basket. Green, who is guarding the baseline nearest James, recognizes this, and leaves his man to challenge LeBron. And so LeBron turns into the GOAT. He double-clutches again, gets the ball past the outstretched hand of Green, and lays it in unimpeded. It is a blur. What I just described to you takes three seconds.
Curry comes back down the floor 10 seconds later and makes a spectacular driving layup in its own right, drawing a foul in the process. He hits the free throw to put his team back up one.
Next possession, at the other end—seriously, just end this already—LeBron palms the ball above his shoulder high and away from his defender at the top of the circle and notices Hill cutting to the hoop. He fires the ball Hill’s way—imagine watching the largest kid in class fling the dodgeball like it weighs as much as a pistachio—and Hill is hooked by Thompson before he can catch it, drawing a foul and two free throws.
Because Hill hit only one of these, the game proceeded to overtime, where Golden State prevailed. But it’s in moments like these you re-watch Rocky I to remember how “winning” can have a flexible definition to it.
