After all the blowouts and uneven performances, we were due for one of those games when nothing made sense and everything happened all at once. Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals -- a 114-111 Cavaliers win in overtime to go up 3-0 on the Hawks -- wasn't a great game so much as it was a completely bonkers game. None of the accepted basketball norms applied in this one. How could they, in a series in which one team is down to seven players and the other is digging up players long buried on the bench to play important roles?
LeBron James triumphs over the surreal, too
Only one player can rescue this weird Eastern Conference Finals and the East’s chances in the NBA Finals.
Consider that LeBron James missed his first 10 shots and that wasn't even close to the weirdest thing that happened. There was the very idea that the Hawks were even in this game in the first place after getting run out of their own building twice, playing without Kyle Korver and later Al Horford. There were blown leads, false hopes, controversies and poor Mike Scott watching a ball go out of bounds.
There was a lot of Shelvin Mack.
There was also Horford's ejection at the end of the first half after he dropped an elbow on Matthew Dellavedova, which led to an intense debate about whether Delly's play was dirty. Dellavedova had tumbled into Horford's legs after getting dragged down by Horford and DeMarre Carroll. There have been three incidents in the last few weeks involving the guard. Two have involved ejections -- Horford and Chicago's Taj Gibson -- and the other ended Korver's season.
No one disputes that Dellavedova plays hard. The Hawks made a point of saying after the game that they felt like he takes it too far and they clearly had Korver’s injury on their minds. How you feel about this likely depends on your rooting interest. No one can possibly know intent, although Horford acknowledged that his reaction was based on Dellavedova’s recent track record. A notion that Dellavedova disagreed with, naturally.
Give the Hawks this much. They could have curled up and gone quietly after losing Korver and Horford, and no one would have said a whole lot about it. They played with the kind of spirit and passion, if not poise and savvy, that was markedly absent during the first two games of the series. Unlike the Rockets, for example, they competed for all 48 minutes and into overtime.
But after all that, they still didn’t have an answer for LeBron. He was the only player providing a sense of normalcy to the evening and even he was operating in a different realm than were used to seeing. Over the final minutes of overtime, James checked in and out of the game several times due to leg cramps, only to hit a game-winning three -- his first of the night -- and register a crucial block on Jeff Teague. He finished with 37 points (on 37 shots!) while grabbing 18 rebounds and handing out 13 assists.
His stat line may have been remarkable, but the most amazing thing about LeBron in these playoffs is that he's carrying a team with three Knicks castaways, a backup big man and an undrafted free agent from Australia by way of Saint Mary's College within a game of the Finals. He's proving, yet again, that one man can carry a team to the NBA Finals, provided that man is LeBron James and the conference is the East.
The Hawks schemed to stop LeBron, or at least make it as difficult as possible, and force the other Cavs to beat them. As one of the game's great playmakers, James was more than happy to comply, which is how we got Iman Shumpert, James Jones, J.R. Smith and Dellavedova cranking 30 attempted threes between them. They made 13 of them and many of the looks were wide open.
Their shooting and Tristan Thompson’s board work kept them in the game through several rough patches. When the game was on the line, James kept the ball in his hands and made the decisive plays that only he can make.
We’ve become so immune to this kind of performance that the immediate postgame reaction centered on whether James was playing up his exhaustion as he collapsed on the court. Or maybe that’s just the way we are now, unable to appreciate what we’ve just seen without comparing one thing to another. Even Marv Albert, calling the game on TNT, saw fit to remind us this wasn’t as dramatic as Michael Jordan’s flu game.
And sure, fine. It wasn’t. There have been better games with higher stakes and more drama. There were 109 missed shots and neither team could sustain anything that resembled a normal, functioning offense. This was a microcosm of the uneven, injury-plagued season the Eastern Conference offered in its alternate universe apart from the dazzling run-and-gun style out West.
Only one player can carry the conference’s mantle into the Finals and make it respectable. It was the only thing that made sense, as it has throughout the series.
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