Heavy lifting nearly all done, Warriors ready to finish job
CLEVELAND — Sweep? The closest the Golden State Warriors have come to acknowledging that they want to finish off the NBA Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers in four games came when forward Draymond Green was asked about the game-day outfits that have been selected by his personal stylist.
“I’ve got a
Game 5 outfit that’s pretty dope,” Green said. “I don’t really want to wear it though.”
The Warriors have seen leads in a best-of-seven series evaporate before. They know that close-out games can be the hardest to win. So they’re not getting ahead of themselves. They’re not using the word “sweep.”
“Just Game 4 is the next one we have to play, and we want to win a championship,” Warriors guard Stephen Curry said. “That word will come out in our celebration if we can get
it done. It’s a matter of winning four games however you can. Got to close the deal with 48 great minutes on Friday.”
Trust me, though, the Warriors very much want the sweep. Coach Steve Kerr’s team wants to clinch their championship Friday night, on the road. They want to put the exclamation point on their season.
Sweeps are rare in the NBA Finals. Former Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan never achieved one. Current Cleveland superstar LeBron James has not achieved one. Only eight teams, including the Rick Barry-led Warriors, who in 1975 won the only non-Curry/ Kerr-led NBA championship in Bay Area history, have won a championship by sweeping their opponent.
The Warriors have had distinctly different finals experiences in recent years. They’ve won championships in six games (in 2015) and five games (in 2017), they’ve lost a championship in seven games (in 2016). They find ways to challenge themselves, as they did in the Western Conference Finals against Houston.
“We won a Game 7 on the road,” Curry said. “We’d never done that before.”
A Finals sweep would also be a new experience.
But it isn’t just the novelty that the Warriors are chasing. They want to live up to their Super Team label. To their own greatness. For most of this season, they haven’t done that. But if the history books record a four-game sweep over James’ Cavaliers, all that sloppy play, all those fits and starts, will be forgotten.
“It has been our most inconsistent season,” Kerr said. “It has been our most difficult season. But our guys sense the finish line. … We’re on the cusp. Now that we’re one game away, we’d like to eliminate that inconsistency and put forth our best effort. Our best game.”
James has been the victim of a sweep once in his nine trips to the Finals — his first time in 2007, when he was 22 years old and facing the San Antonio Spurs. James will fight with everything he has to keep from being eliminated in four games, and his teammates will feed off that effort. The Cavaliers know they could have won two out of the first three games and will use that for inspiration.
“We’re not going to give in,” Cavaliers forward Kevin Love said.
But there’s an exhaustion, bordering on resignation, with this Cavaliers team. They miss point guard Kyrie Irving — traded to Boston after last season — and aren’t shy about saying so. The remaking of their roster midseason was draining. The path here has been hard.
“This has been one of the most challenging seasons of my career,” James said. “It’s been three or four, maybe four or five, seasons wrapped into one.”
James has been effusive in his praise for the Warriors this week. It is a sincere evaluation. But it could be calculated as well to make sure the Warriors feel the weight of expectations, the burden of their Super Team legacy.
After Game 3 on Wednesday, James compared the Warriors to the New England Patriots.
“The margin for error is very low,” he said. “You can’t have mistakes. They’re not going to beat themselves. When you force a miscue on them, you have to be able to capitalize. You can’t have miscommunication, you can’t have flaws, you can’t have ‘my faults’ or ‘my bads’ because they’re going to make you pay.”
Cleveland coach Tyronn Lue coined the term “spurtability” for the way the Warriors make their opponents pay, drowning them in lethal scoring runs.
But just because the Warriors are capable of such brilliance doesn’t guarantee it will happen.
“Every time we step on the floor, we put pressure on ourselves to be great,” Curry said. “Whether you live up to it or not, you’ve got to be OK with your effort and your intensity and the result of the game. We all want to show up and do our jobs at a high level because that’s what got us to where we are today.”
The Warriors were up 3-0 last year, but couldn’t close it out in Cleveland. They ended up winning in five games, with the clincher back home. However, this year there’s a different feel.
“Our attitude is kind of like not satisfied,” Warriors forward Andre Iguodala said. “Whereas last year we were kind of a little bit giddy. You could see it walking off the court. We were like, ‘We got it.’ Last night was, ‘Good win.’ We walked off and it was like, ‘We still got a lot of work to do.’ ”
At the tail end of a grueling season, there’s one last obstacle to overcome.
“We understand that Game 4 is going to be the toughest game that we’ve played in the series,” Curry said. “We’ve got to be able to weather the storm, to keep our composure the best we can.
“Close-out games are the hardest things that you can ever experience in the playoffs.”
There’s a lot of anticipation: for Game 4, for the potential sweep.
And, of course, to see Green’s Friday night outfit.