LeBron Doing "Everything" It Takes To Win It All

Delly is making the difference for a team that needs it.

Cleveland is clearly a multi-cultural team in a multi-cultural city in which you can find a little bit of everything.  Nowhere else can you imagine an African American basketball star coached by an Israeli basketball coach whose team's character comes from an Australian Delly.

Much will be and should be said for this special trio whose decisions keep forcing the pressure on the Golden State Warriors, and they have yet to respond well to it.  Desperation basketball is deceptive because a lot of confidence comes from the realization that you suddenly have very little time and nothing left to lose, as a loss seems certain.


For three games, the Warriors have been pushed to the point in which they scratch and claw their way back.  The fight or flight reflex bottles fear into a fuel- a mixture of one part adrenaline and two parts pride.  Fear can help you to compete with pride, but it won 't win the game for you even though many teams often confuse caged desperation as something to build upon.  Such fuel can shoot you to the moon, but you had better save some fuel to finish the journey home.

Steph shoots 50% from the field after getting hot late.
Will it carry over into the next game?

Desperation has encouraged the kind of shooting that Golden State keeps needing in order to make up the deficit that they have erased in the first 3 games.  Cleveland will certainly see the most dangerous version of the Warriors from the very beginning of game 4, so they will have to stem the tide and keep the game manageable in the first half. Some of Golden State's best basketball has been a byproduct of Cleveland's worst defense and more passive offense which keeps returning as they attempt to coast to the end of games.

Whether or not Golden State can actually play end game ball to start the game is actually the question we've been waiting to see every since the Warriors were favored to win this series.




Expectations were high for the Golden State Warriors so very few of their supporters are willing to give up the ghost, nor will this team. The story of these first 3 games has been fairly consistent- minus the overtime that seemed on its way for the third game as well.  No player has scored at a high  enough clip to allow either team to go on a real run.  Every sporadic run has come from the other team getting lax or going cold.  Typically, that team has been Golden State unless you are talking about the last 10 minutes of the 4th quarter.



 That's when the cards have turned in the direction of the Warriors, who play consistent enough in the 4th quarter to chip away at the lead Cleveland keeps compiling. The leads have only been single digits for the most part- until last night's 20 point 3rd quarter expanse.  Jordan was known to beat teams in this kind of 'keep it close, lull you to sleep and turn up the heat' fashion, and coach Steve Kerr spent a few seasons playing with his Airness.  In other words, this could be a tactic that the Warriors are intentionally employing at the end of games, but I doubt that.  This team expected to win this series, but they don't anymore.  They are in for it and every player now recognizes the challenge.

What Will It Take?  EVERYTHING!

LeBron is right.  For so many reasons, game 4 now becomes the most important game in this series because the Warriors were dangerous when they were less desperate than they are now.

Everything is on the line, and everything will be needed from LeBron for his team to win game 4 and avoid the dreaded split that would give this series right back into the hands of the Warriors. When the world keeps asking him to reveal the secret motivation that he should have kept secret, LeBron just smiles and declines.

The real secret is that he already told us EVERYTHING we needed to hear. Some of it he said in the post game interviews, and the rest is being spoken with each game performance.

This man is willing, and able, to do everything it takes to win the championship of the NBA.  In fact, I am venturing to say that never before have we seen ONE player who can actually do everything in the game of basketball, and did it en route to a title.

He might not be as titillating a shooter as Steph Curry is at moments, but he is totally capable of taking and making shots against double and triple teams just like Steph.  A few times in this series he has made them from extra long range just to remind us that he can do that to- just like Steph.  LeBron can certainly pass, evidenced by his high assist average in the finals along side a high volume of shots.  He is not scoring at a high percentage for the first time in forever, but he has never chosen high volume shooting over high percentage shooting, and is only answering the call for his team- over and over again.

Like scratching nails on a blackboard, LeBron is enduring shooting at a/low percentage against his own will. In the post game interview with his former (and maybe future) teammate D-Wade, LeBron educated us that his shooting percentage has increased for each of the last 7 season prior to this year in which everything has been asked of him from time to time.

7 seasons in a row?


Although I didn't realize that statistic, I have watched LeBron add something new to his game each and every season that he has played.

After he first went to the finals and lost,  I saw him come back and post people up with the Hakeem Olajuwon Dream Shake.  The next year, he started raining long shots like a 2 guard.  If you watch this series, you are likely to see a hook shot that rarely misses even if it doesn't touch the sky like Kareem's did.  When he gets tired, he now relies on his Dirk Nowitzki fade away jumper which also seems to fall about as often as his baby hook does.

Dellavedova takes a break after the "And-1" bank shot that
 secured the game for the Cleveland Cavaliers. 

The secret of LeBron James is that he is the only player in the history of the league,  able to do everything as he does, and there is not really a close second because Oscar Robertson is a distant second.   This season, he has added player coach to the list of everything he can do just in case someone tries to use the reigning ring holder, Bill Russell as an example of something LeBron hasn't done.




Did I mention miracles? LeBron does those too. He basically invented the Australian Delly, and turned him into a cult hero.