The Cavs have won every day of the Eastern Conference semifinals, if you think about it.
Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday.
Four days have come and gone in the two East semis, and Cleveland has emerged the winner at the end of them.
Let’s not pretend to ignore the larger reality behind the first two games of these series. The Cavs-Hawks matchup remains as lopsided as it was a year ago, only with Cleveland delivering knockout punches on offense and not defense. The Miami Heat-Toronto Raptors series has been riveting and tense and as close as a great shave… and horribly, brutally, painfully, ugly.
The Eastern Conference Finals aren’t for another week and a half, but no one with any real intellectual honesty is saying that the East Finals will be a compelling contest laden with drama.
The Cavs are going to jog to the East finish line again.
This takes nothing away from Cleveland. This is not meant to diminish Cleveland — anything but. The Cavaliers have made themselves into the East’s best team. It is a distinction they always owned. It is a distinction they always deserved. It is a distinction a clickbait-driven and pageview-seeking media apparatus wanted to throw into question, just for the sake of a business model… without honestly believing the matter ever existed in a state of uncertainty.
The Cavs were always the sole and overwhelming favorite in the East. Some people, hoping against hope, wanted drama to enter into the equation, and to be fair to that subgroup, the Miami Heat could have owned a genuine chance if Chris Bosh had been able to play. Yet, once that ship sailed, this ceased to be a real debate.
Everyone knew the Cavs were the only Eastern Conference championship candidate. There was no write-in candidacy, no insurgency from anyone else — at least not another candidacy which was worth taking seriously.
Everyone knew — some were willing to say as much, and others erected the pretense of a drama which didn’t exist.
We can say this now. We should say this now. There should no longer be any artifice or misdirection about the matter.
This series: pic.twitter.com/g4vaoCnVvh
— Trenton Jocz (@TrentonJocz) May 6, 2016
Is this what watching the Pacers is like?
— Jared Wade (@Jared_Wade) May 6, 2016
Miami has 18 turnovers and seven assists and only trails by one point.
— Andy Bailey (@AndrewDBailey) May 6, 2016
The Raptors have been really good when the Heat have given them the ball.
— (((Eric Koreen))) (@ekoreen) May 6, 2016
Heat-Raptors Game 2 on Thursday was little different from Game 1 on Tuesday. The eerie similarity in which the team that forced overtime plummeted in the extra period remained intact. It’s in many ways a perfect metaphor for the series itself. Any small bread crumb of quality quickly dissolves into a much larger bowl of bad basketball.
Toronto’s backcourt bricklayers and Miami’s turnover machine have combined to create an eyesore of a series in which effort is the one laudable element of each team… and that’s it. Jonas Valanciunas and Goran Dragic have been terrific, and beyond them, it’s been hard to find players which have been consistently great for their sides.
The hate-tweeting, the hate-watching, the fear and loathing from both fan bases — these have been the most entertaining aspects of the series.
Both organizations will derive a lot of satisfaction from winning this series and reaching the NBA’s final four this season, and rightly so.
Yet, we know that a basketball equivalent of a Red Wedding awaits in the East Finals at the hands of the Cavs. A bloodbath awaits.
Not one soul should be surprised… if you bought one word of the media’s Cleveland panic during the latter half of the regular season, shame on you.
Everyone should have known better. Most did… but the memory of all these “Cavs are coming apart” articles over the past few months remains a marker of which commentators were just slinging the hash for a buck, and which ones exercised appropriate restraint.
The Cavs are going to keep on winning every day the East playoffs remain in progress. Only when the NBA Finals arrive will Cleveland face an honest test.
Most of us knew this all along. This past week has affirmed the truth some of us hoped would be different… but never should have doubted in the center of the mind and heart.
