If you had pulled a Rip Van Winkle, or perhaps overindulged on a bit too much to try to get over the results of what went down approximately eight years ago this week and had just woken up yesterday, you might have immediately come to the conclusion you weren’t out all that long at all. Especially if you had looked at your phone and immediately gone to a news or sports site. Though, in all likelihood, you might also have noticed you had about a million alerts for IOS upgrades that could have been a dead giveaway to your reality.
Apart from that possible spoiler, not only did you have the deja vu that some guy named Trump had somehow won the presidency from a perceptually superior female candidate, but you also had the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers as the two best teams in the NBA. Remember that they faced each other in three consecutive NBA finals, which began just around the time that obese egotist decided he couldn’t handle a couple of flights of stairs and instead took a golden escalator ride into history. Also recall at the time of the first anointing eight Novembers ago the Cavaliers were indeed the NBA champions, fresh off a shocking conquest of Steph Curry and company with an impropable comeback from a 1-3 deficit to give Believeland their first-ever real pro basketball title (the George Steinbrenner-owned Pipers of the 1961-62 ABL don’t fully count) and the city their first title in any major sport since the 1948 Indians.
Well, last night the two current front-runners faced off in what was arguably the biggest game of the Trump 2.0 era (yeah, he’s not yet been inaugrated but, details, details) and, wearing the exact same black “action C” uniforms they wore when they conquered Curry in ’16, they again came out on top convincingl, as the ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Brian Dulik wrote last night:
Darius Garland scored 27 points and Evan Mobley had 23 as the Cleveland Cavaliers routed the Golden State Warriors 136-117 on Friday night, extending their franchise-best start to 10-0 this season.
The Cavaliers became the first team in NBA history to win their first 10 games and score at least 110 points in each of them. Wilt Chamberlain and the 1960-61 Philadelphia Warriors had shared the mark with nine.
Cleveland also set a franchise record with a 41-point halftime lead at 83-42 — tying the eighth largest in the NBA’s shot clock era — and equaled its mark for points in a half. Ty Jerome scored 13 of his 20 points before the break.
And the fact we are talking about the prowess of a healthy Garland and an evolved Mobley, two factors that weren’t evident when the Cavs exited the playoffs meekly last spring in the second round of the Eastern Conference bracketing is perhaps the biggest reason why this version is already eclipsing the standards set by either of the LeBron James eras, at least regular-season wise. And they also more than made up for the shortcomings of its current top player, as Dulik further explained:
The NBA’s highest-scoring team didn’t miss a beat on an off night by All-Star shooting guard Donovan Mitchell, who was limited to 12 points. He missed nine of his 13 field goal attempts and committed four turnovers.
And someone who was around then and now observed to the AKRON BEACON JOURNAL’s Nate Ulrich he’s seen something like this before–just not from his opponent:
New Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson and Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green used the same three words to describe how Cleveland dominated during a historic first half Friday night at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
“Drive, kick, swing. That’s kind of our motto, and I thought we did a hell of a job in the first half,” Atkinson said.
A Warriors assistant coach the past three seasons, Atkinson explained the Cavs emphasized “drive, kick, swing” during shootaround Friday morning.
Green explained he sees Atkinson’s Cavs playing with a style similar to those Warriors teams because of the ball movement and players “flying around” the court. Atkinson helped Golden State claim another championship in 2022, so he knows a winning formula. The Cavs had 22 assists on 28 successful field goals in the first half.
Achieving the same results as 2016 by using a playbook from your opponents in the 2020s. I guess that can work even in arenas for basketball games, not just political ones.
Courage…