Have You Heard the One About the Warriors and the 3-1 Lead?

If you follow the Cavaliers at all, there is no chance you haven’t heard a Warriors blew a 3-1 lead joke. They permeate twitter even months after the event and a quick google search brings back well over a million results. Some of the jokes were legitimately hilarious, some hack as in any topic, but the entire premise of the joke is that Golden State is terrible. Obviously, trash talking is more fun this way, but a more accurate and less repetitive perspective is that Cleveland is just that good.

While Steph Curry was the NBA’s first unanimous MVP, that doesn’t mean he is the best basketball player in the league. Yes, Curry lead the league in points per game (30), steals (2.1) and three pointers made and attempted (402 of 886), two stats he has lead the league in for four straight years. While these numbers look pretty, they don’t take into consideration a full half of the game, something that might not be important to MVP voters, but is extremely important in winning an NBA championship.

It’s extremely difficult to say, however, that James isn’t the best player in basketball and the focus on the Warriors “blowing” the series rather than the Cavs winning it takes away from that. He’s only 31 and will turn 32 in December and is already 11^th in NBA history in points scored with 26,833 and, with another normal season for him, he could surpass Shaq for 7^th and even with a down season he’s almost certain to move beyond Hakeem Olajuwon, Elvin Hayes and Moses Malone for eighth.

As mentioned before, however, there’s a lot more to the game than offense and if there was one single moment that defined the Cavs coming back from a two game deficit in the NBA Finals, it was James’ block of Andre Iguodala in game seven. Iguodala wasn’t going to blow an easy lay-up that would have untied the game and given Golden State the lead, James hustled down the court and forcibly blocked him. It was that kind of effort all throughout the Finals that lead to the Cavs comeback and the fact that they are being lead by the best basketball player since Michael Jordan should have made it more of a surprise that they got down 3-1 in the first place than the actual comeback.

The jokes were fun for a moment, then tedious, then funny again for a second, then simply repetitive, but now it’s time to start over. It’s time to move on to another season as World Champions. Part of the value of placing the emphasis on GS for losing was because they were the previous NBA Champions, they won so many regular season games and had the MVP. Now, the Cavs are the top of the league, have the best overall player in a generation and every other team in the league will be gunning for them including the revamped Warriors. It’s time to act like Champions who earned their title, not the recipients of another’s failure and work on making it two in a row. You can guarantee that’s the way that Lebron and the rest of the Cavs are looking at it.