LeBron James tallied 23 points and the Cleveland Cavaliers moved within one victory of reaching the National Basketball Association finals with a 116-78 blowout home triumph over the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday (Thursday in Manila).
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But normal service resumed via the 38-point humiliation in Cleveland on Wednesday as the Cavaliers took a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series, moving to within a game of the NBA Finals for a second successive season ahead of Friday’s trip to Toronto.
For the Raptors, it seems playing at Quicken Loans Arena is like their own personal Earth-destroying asteroid 64 million years in the making.
At one point in the second quarter the Cavs defense held Toronto without a field goal for eight minutes. He spent the fourth quarter resting on the bench.
“We gotta come out from the beginning and that starts with the Big 3”, James said, referring to himself, Love and Kyrie Irving, who added 23 points.
The Cavaliers started the game on an 11-7 run, and after the Raptors responded with a scoring spree of their own, Cleveland burned their first timeout of the game. Biyombo had just four rebounds after grabbing 40 the past two games.
Jonas Valanciunas played 18 minutes in his first game action in 18 days since returning from an ankle sprain.
Can you imagine that we are talking game 5 of the Eastern Conference in the way the Cleveland Cavs have played the first 10 games of the playoffs? “He gets it going, and we’ve got to meet his force with our force and do a better job of one-on-one defense with him in the low post and not just look at him out on the 3-point line”.
The Cavs have outscored the Raptors by 88 points in their three home games.
A courtside doctor might have stopped this one in the first half.
“I feel like we lost the game in the first quarter”. He finished 8 of 10 from the field, a confidence-boosting performance that should temporarily quiet his critics.
The contest was all but over after the first quarter, when Cleveland’s 37 points were the most they’ve scored in any quarter in this series. The Cavs are not a come-from-behind team and they are definitely used to leading for the entirety of the game, but this is the Conference Finals and if they want to advance to the NBA Finals, they will need to improve their efforts tonight. And there was James, Wednesday morning, with the series seemingly hanging in the balance, talking about the sense of calm he was feeling and bringing to his team. Expect that to carry over into Game 5.
Prediction: The Cavs are reeling and the Raptors are certainly confident they can dethrone the defending East champions.
But to truly make that claim, they’ll have to carry their impressive play from the three games in Cleveland to Toronto for Game 6 on Friday.
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Raptors: Dropped to 2-7 on the road in this postseason…. Lowry did nothing the entire game and really looked like he needed to go decompress. Bismack Biyombo was doing all of the things that fans are accustomed to seeing Thompson do. The Cavs were 10-of-21 (47.6 pct.) behind the arc, led by Kevin Love with three-of-four.
