ALL the records were there—the bad records, I mean.
LeBron James, the planet’s player to watch all these years, was the player to watch again in Game One of the National Basketball Association (NBA) Eastern Conference Finals.
But this time, you didn’t see him the way you wanted him to play. He seemed like strait-jacketed.
And so, you ended up watching him giving you the worst watch of James’s caged life.
He had playoff lows of seven turnovers and 15 points.
Had had his Cavaliers cave in to a 26-point deficit at the half, becoming the biggest halftime playoff gap in James’s career since he entered the NBA right out of high school.
That was only half of the James story on Monday.
But it was enough for Boston to bamboozle Cleveland in a 108-83 victory that equaled their four-game clash this season at 2-2.
In the regular season, Cleveland posted a 2-1 lead, first defeating Boston, 102-99, in 2017 before dropping a 102-88 loss on January 3. Cleveland got back with a Game Three 121-99 rout of Boston on February 11 at Boston’s TD Garden.
But James was practically absent in their Game One tussle the other day.
And the chief credit goes to Brad Stevens, the innovative coach of the Boston Celtics.
Stevens devised a plan to shackle James all gamelong.
Stevens assigned Marcus Morris to chase James from the opening tip all the way practically to the showers.
James was just 5-of-16 from the field and zero in five attempts from the three-point arc. Unbelievable.
The beauty in Stevens’s defensive ploy against James was, in moments that Morris missed a tight grip on LeBron, all the four Celtics seemed all ready for a help defense.
And so, it was not just a man-to-man guarding, a double-teaming or a triple-teaming defense but, seemingly, all five greenshirts on the parquet floor were swarming all over James.
It was like seeing five men from the city dog pound trying their damnedest to snare a Doberman gone stray in the neighborhood. Thoroughly successful.
Thus, with 7:09 left to play—and Boston unreachable like a thoroughbred inches away from winning a horserace—James was told to stay on the bench. For good.
But it is just the first game.
Surely, one game won’t define a series as protracted as a best-of-seven.
And so, expect a different James in today’s Game Two to rise from the ruins of Game One.
Listen to James after Game One: “I have zero level of concern at this stage. [But] I’ve been down before in the postseason. For me, there’s never any level of concern. No matter how bad I played tonight, with seven turnovers, how inefficient I was shooting the ball. We have another opportunity to be better as a ball club coming on Tuesday night [Wednesday morning, PHL Time], and we’ll see what happens.”
Well, historically, James, after a bad game, comes back with a big bang in the next.
I guess we can expect that happening again today.
Aren’t the best of the lot like that—if not the majority of them?
THAT’S IT People asked me: Why was Manny Pacquiao not seen with Floyd Mayweather Jr. during Mayweather’s recent whirlwind visit to the Philippines? Both boxers were at fault, as not one of them made efforts to meet each other—even if only for show. They haven’t buried the hatchet? Ego? Pride? But aren’t fighters supposed to be the best examples of sportsmanship? Not with these guys, I guess.