After winning the most games in regular season history, the Warriors came up short in the Finals, losing three consecutive games for the first time all season after dominating the Cavaliers through the first four games of the series to the tune of a 3-1 lead. I picked the Cavaliers to win in seven, and bet them in Game 7 as 5-point underdogs, but I also was dead wrong about a lot that happened during the course of a series that turned into a long, odd trip.
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LeBron James made good on his pledge to bring a championship to the city near his hometown when the Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors in a tense Game 7 in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday night.
This is the first major sports championship that a Cleveland team has won since 1964.
Green, the only Warriors player to turn in a Game 7-worthy performance (32 points, 15 rebounds, nine assists), credited Cleveland while sounding a defiant tone.
They overcame the Golden State Warriors, the team with the best regular-season record in history. Festus Ezeli started for the first time all postseason in place of the injured Andrew Bogut, and the Warriors avoided a repeat of their slow start in Game 6 thanks to five three-pointers in the first.
The game featured 20 lead changes and was tied 11 times. “We had our chances and just couldn’t get it done.”Four minutes”.
No team had ever rallied from a 3-1 deficit to win the NBA Finals.
Curry finished with 17 points for the Warriors. I don’t know why we had to take the hard road.
LeBron James, the Akron, Ohio, native who returned to the Cavaliers with the goal of leading Cleveland to a championship, scored 41 points in each of the last two games.
“He had a freakin’ triple-double in Game 7 of an NBA Finals game”.
As the final seconds ticked off on the giant scoreboard inside Quicken Loans Arena, 18,000 fans, some of them strangers when Sunday night began, cried, hugged, screamed and shared a moment many of them have spent a lifetime dreaming of.
The score remained the same with 1:09 remaining as Andre Iguodala and James blocked each other’s shot attempts.
It was a far cry from 2010 when James spurned his home state for Miami in an ill-advised television special that skewed his public image and saw Cavaliers fans burn his replica jerseys in the Cleveland streets.
“Cleveland, this is for you”, a tearful James screamed on the court after the frantic final seconds. Curry, who went 6 of 19, said Saturday he needed to play the best game of his career.
What Green and the Warriors decide to learn from this experience, how they respond, will be one of the most fascinating questions headed into next season. Yet many in the media stumble over themselves to do that very thing.
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Dellavedova, who was joined in the Cavaliers’ locker room by his parents Mark and Leanne, girlfriend Anna Schroeder and other family members and friends, said he would take a few days off before heading to Australia to join his Boomers teammates ahead of the Rio Olympics. Twice he had played in two National Basketball Association finals Game 7, twice he had won both.
