You’re a bitch.”
The words from Draymond Green froze LeBron James. Green had said far worse to James over the course of the Finals, and James had used worse language himself to Green and his teammates. But as the Chicago Bulls’ Joakim Noah had learned by surprise a year earlier, that was a trigger word for James in the heat of a game.
“I’m a father of three and a man,” James said back to Green in the midst of live play, the ball in Andre Iguodala’s hands just a few feet away.
“You’re still a bitch,” Green spat back.
Within seconds, Green and James were tangled with each other. Danny Crawford, one of the NBA’s most veteran and respected officials, stepped in and called a foul on each man, hoping to defuse the situation.
“I’m all cool with competition. I’m all fine with that, but some of the words that came out of his mouth were overboard,” James said. “I felt like at that point in time it was a little bit outside of basketball.”
There were three minutes left in Game 4 and it was essentially decided. The Warriors had stormed back, Steph Curry looking like his MVP self and nailing eight three-pointers on his way to 38 points as he repeatedly silenced the Cleveland crowd. The Warriors were up 10 and about to go up 3–1 in the series heading home, their second consecutive title over the Cavs in a death grip.
But something had just happened that would change the course of the series, something that would become one of the more controversial plays in NBA history. It happened so fast that Crawford had missed it, even though it was right in front of him. James was more obsessed with Green’s choice of words. Green thought he was acting in self-defense.
James and Green had started out shoving as Green set a pick for Curry. Green pushed James and then James pushed back, Green falling over in an effort to get officials to call a foul. The act miffed James, although he was often guilty of such flopping antics himself. Then he stepped over the top of Green.
This is where opinions diverge. James said he was trying to get back into the play and that was the fastest route. Green and his teammates believed James was stepping over him in a demeaning way. Though Warriors players were more coarse in their description, they felt James was almost being primal in dragging his lower body over Green’s head. Green’s response was also as old as time—he swung his arm up and hit James between the legs.
The entire ordeal took only a second in real time. But Green had been disciplined by the league earlier in the playoffs for kicking Thunder center Steven Adams in the groin on a play the Thunder howled as suspension-worthy while Green insisted it was only the result of body momentum. He’d also tripped a Thunder player and appeared to intentionally strike Adams with a blow to his injured hand. The result was a list of warning penalties by the league.
James was in the middle of an uneven performance. As usual, his statistics were sensational—25 points, 13 rebounds, nine assists, two steals, and three blocks. But he committed seven turnovers, which was crushing against the Warriors’ high-speed attack. Worse, he and Irving were in their isolation mode again. Irving had 34 points, which was good, but when they played independent of each other instead of together it worked to the Warriors’ advantage, because the Cavs became easier to defend as a whole. James and Irving took 33 of the team’s 38 shots in the second half and the Warriors outscored them by 16 points. Love came back from the concussion and Lue brought him off the bench. But he wasn’t able to be a difference-maker.
James was frustrated at the officials. He was convinced the Warriors were getting away with roughhousing him. He played 46 minutes and only ended up drawing two shooting fouls. And of course, there was the scoreboard, which read 108–97 at the end.
The Cavs locker room was silent. James sat at his locker, his knees in ice, and quietly picked at a plate of chicken and rice. He was on the verge of falling to 2–5 in his career in the Finals, a number that he knew could be used to horsewhip his legacy for the rest of his life. He was playing at a high level, just as he’d done the previous two Finals that he also lost. As he picked at his meal, a reporter walked up to him with a cell phone. On it was the footage of his run-in with Green. In slow motion, Green’s swing into his groin was plain to see. James watched it once, twice, and then a third time before handing the phone back.
“Yeah,” he said, “but they won’t do anything.”
In an office next door, the parties weren’t so calm. David Griffin and Ty Lue were in a debate about whether to make the officiating an issue in the postgame press conference. Commenting on officiating during the playoffs is as old as the postseason itself and there’s a reason teams do it. Though it almost always triggers a fine from the league—two of the Cavs’ opponents had already been slapped with one in the playoffs—it also sometimes works. Griffin and Lue, down 3–1, decided there was nothing left to lose.
“LeBron never gets calls,” Lue said. “I mean, he attacks. He’s one of the guys that attacks the paint every single play. And he doesn’t get a fair whistle all the time because of his strength and because of his power and guys bounce off of him. But those are still fouls, and we weren’t able to get them.”
“It’s been like that all year,” James said. “I’m getting hit, but the refs are not seeing it that way.”
Pressed further, he cut off the topic: “I’m going to save my 25K, okay?”
James, who is immensely wealthy, is sometimes funny about money. He owns a fleet of cars from classics to Ferraris to high-end luxury cars to a specially outfitted van. He flies liberally on private jets. But after getting to know Warren Buffett in 2006—he even spent a day with him at Buffett’s headquarters in Omaha—he took Buffett’s advice to save seriously. He went through a phase where he didn’t even want to pay a copay to see a doctor who was outside the network of the Cavs’ insurance plan. He didn’t like to have the feeling he was wasting money.
The next day, Lue got hit with a $25,000 fine. James did not.
Lue had another message beyond the officiating. The situation was dire. No team had ever come back from being down 3–1 in the Finals. It had happened 33 times in history and only three teams had ever even forced a Game 7, and that hadn’t happened for half a century. The Warriors hadn’t lost three games in a row in nearly three years. Two of the final three games would be in Oakland, where the Warriors were 50–3 that season and 98–6 over the previous two seasons.
“If you don’t think we can win, don’t get on the plane,” Lue told his team before they left for the night. “We’ve got to come back anyway, so we might as well come back and play Game 6.”
Late in the night, after James had gone home and stewed about the outcome of the game with his wife, he pulled out his phone and opened the Cavs’ group text and composed a message.
“No matter how we got to this point, we’re here now,” James wrote. “We have to go to Golden State for Game 5 and we have to come home anyway. So why not come home and play a Game 6. Let it go, play hard, be focused, follow my lead, and I’ll make sure you get home for a Game 6.”
The next morning, just a few hours later, James was the first person in to work at the team practice facility. The outlook was indeed bleak, but he was not giving up.
James wasn’t the only one with such a feeling. The more Griffin thought about it, the more he grew amused. It got to the point where he was laughing to himself. Of course the team was down 3–1, he thought, they had to be down. His team never did anything the easy way. It was always about coming to the brink of disaster. This wasn’t a crisis, Griffin decided, not at all. This was his team playing their game.
Maybe Griffin was punch-drunk from stress and pressure. He’d built a wildly expensive roster and if it failed again he’d get a big dose of blame. He was the one who had fired David Blatt, who had put together a game plan that had pushed the Warriors in the Finals the year before with way less firepower than they had now.
But Griffin didn’t see it that way at all. In his twenty-plus seasons working in the NBA, he’d rarely felt a clarity like this. And he felt he had to share it. With his emotions flowing, he composed an email that he didn’t just send to the team and coaches, he sent it to the entire company—the sales department, the marketing department, the vice presidents, the secretaries, the security guards.
“Griff called me and said, ‘I’m going to send an email to the entire company, how do I do it?’ And I said, ‘Why, what the hell are you doing?’” said Tad Carper, the Cavs senior vice president of communications. “At that point his intensity level was like somebody who’d had this awakening.”
Griffin sent the email. It read:
Family-
If you are like me, and sadly for all of you, many of you are more like me than you’d care to admit, you felt a little like a bomb went off late into last night and maybe even this morning. Needless to say, we are all disappointed that we didn’t hold serve at home. However, I have a few thoughts to share with you that I think might make the wait for our Game 5 victory in Oakland and our ultimate triumph in an epic Game 7 a little more reality than dream.
Consider the two seasons we have spent together and think about all these things that make us HISTORICALLY SPECIAL.
We enter LAST SEASON the prohibitive Vegas favorite to win the NBA Title.
Our starting center tears his Achilles, 26 games into the season.
Our MVP focal point misses 2 weeks with a back injury.
We become the first team in NBA history to enter as NBA Title favorites to start a season with a losing record thru 39 games (actually went 19–20).
We trade one player for 3, get our MVP back and go an NBA best 32–7 over the next 39 games. During this stretch we ranked 1st in the NBA in winning percentage (.821), first in scoring differential (10.6) and first in three-pointers made per game (11.8).
We sweep our first round opponent and in Game 4, lose our starting power forward for the remainder of the playoffs and most of the next 6 months.
We win the next round against Chicago despite starting down 2–1 while our starting point guard is battling knee issues. He only plays 12 minutes in the Game 6 win.
We win one game because our assistant coaches save our head coach from calling a time out we didn’t actually have. That would have resulted in a technical foul and the ball to Chicago in a tie game. Never seen that before either.
We then sweep a 60-win team and the No. 1 seed in the East while Kyrie misses games 2–3 with the knee issue. WE MOVE ON TO THE NBA FINALS.
LeBron and James Jones appear in their 5th straight NBA Finals.
We drop G1 and lose Kyrie for the remainder of the playoffs. We are now down two All-Stars. So what do we do…
We win the next 2 games to take a 2–1 lead over this same Warriors team.
Our new starting point guard, Delly, has to be taken to the hospital on a stretcher after the G3 win because we can’t hydrate him fast enough to combat his muscles that are shutting down from exhaustion.
The Warriors discover their best line-up as a desperation move to save their finals, because we had beaten the piss out of them physically.
Wounded and battered, we eventually succumb but everyone is ready to run it back healthy.
Everyone returns, we keep the band intact, a group that went 34–3 in the last 37 games that LeBron, Kevin and Kyrie all play in.
Ownership spends the 2nd most money in NBA history to achieve this.
We start training camp without Kevin Love, Kyrie Irving and Iman Shumpert. All of whom are rehabbing from surgery.
We lead the NBA’s Eastern Conference literally wire to wire.
We are the #1 seed in the EAST.
We sweep the first and second rounds of the NBA Playoffs.
We are the first team in EASTERN CONFERENCE HISTORY to start the Playoffs 10–0.
Coach Lue becomes the first Head Coach in NBA history to start his career 10–0 in the post season, passing Pat Riley who was 9–0.
We win our 17th straight Eastern Conference game in the Conference Finals, becoming the first team in CONFERENCE HISTORY to do that.
We finish off Toronto in 6 games, winning Game 5 by a FRANCHISE POST SEASON RECORD 38 points.
LeBron and James Jones make their 6th straight NBA Finals appearances. AN NBA RECORD for anyone not a Bill Russell Celtic.
Along the way, we set NBA PLAYOFF records for most consecutive games with 12 or more three-pointers (8). NBA RECORD 77 three-pointers in 4 game sweep of Atlanta. We are the FIRST TEAM IN NBA HISTORY to make 15 three-pointers in 4 straight games. AND, we set the ALL-TIME NBA RECORD for threes in a game with 25 in Game 2 vs. the Hawks.
We enter the NBA FINALS with the LARGEST SCORING DIFFERENTIAL in EASTERN CONFERENCE HISTORY (+177pts).
We win Game 3 by 30 points over a 73-win team. Becoming the first team in NBA FINALS HISTORY to win by 30 after losing by 30 the game prior.
So, what does all this mean? It means more than you have ever dared to imagine, but no more than we have always done. NO TEAM IN NBA HISTORY has ever come back from down 3–1 in the NBA Finals. Rather than asking you the cliché: “Why not us?” I would like to offer the following:
WE HAVE SEEN NBA HISTORY IN THE MAKING EVERYDAY HERE. It’s not “why not us?” It’s “What the [expletive] else would we do?” We love it harder. We love it RECORD-SETTING. You know in your hearts and in your minds we have been the NBA DRAMA KINGS since we came together. I bet you can, and I’d love for you to add to this HISTORICAL DATABASE. What else speaks to you about the RECORD-SETTING insanity that has been YOUR CLEVELAND CAVALIERS!
Let me be the first to tell you, NBA HISTORY HAS BEEN WAITING ON US. No one has done this, because WE have never been here before. We will become the first, because that is all we have ever known how to do.
NBA HISTORY HAS CHOSEN US. Don’t run, don’t be afraid. Don’t be discouraged. WE WILL SEIZE OUR RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THAT HISTORY!
Griffin printed out copies and put one in every player’s locker to make sure they saw it when they arrived for practice.
“That was some letter,” owner Dan Gilbert said. “I was like ‘you believe we can win three in a row, two games at Golden State? They’ve lost like two home games in two years.’ He believed. That rallied us.”
Gilbert is obsessed with surrounding himself with optimism. He uses it as a foundational principle for building his businesses and hiring people. As a result, his Cavs organization is stocked with people who think this way. But Griffin, a lifelong grinder, isn’t really one of them. He’s self-deprecating with a good sense of humor, but not a sunny optimist. He’s much more of a realist, which serves him well as a basketball executive. But he does have a belief in destiny.
When Griffin had a recurrence of cancer it was natural to look at it as terrible luck, but Griffin looked at it as fate. Had he not come to the Cavs, he likely wouldn’t have been treated at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the finest cancer hospitals in the world. The doctors there healed him and allowed him to keep working. He did truly believe in the concept of things happening for a reason. He saw that in the Cavs team, even if many of Gilbert’s employees thought he might have lost it when they read the email.
There was, however, a reason for hope coming. After reviewing the film, the NBA decided that Green had committed a flagrant foul when hitting James between the legs on that play. The league declared, “Green made unnecessary contact with a retaliatory swipe of his hand to the groin.” The act alone carried a fine and, had it been called during the game, would’ve resulted in two free throws plus possession. But it was the third flagrant foul Green had been assessed in the playoffs. He’d body-slammed the Houston Rockets’ Michael Beasley, plus the kick to Adams’s groin. The three together triggered an automatic suspension for the next game. And so with that, Green was suspended for Game 5.
The Warriors were incensed and their fans were equally furious and began a wave of backlash against the decision. It was challenging for the public to understand Green wasn’t suspended only for the quick swipe at James alone but as the culmination of a series of fouls. Shortly after the Cavs had been complaining about officiating, it was now the Warriors side claiming they’d been wronged. Even the Thunder fans were upset—Green’s foul on Adams had been more egregious and didn’t result in suspension. Technically the NBA punished Green worse for the Adams kick, a flagrant-2 foul, than for Green’s act on James, a flagrant-1. But the nuance was lost in the heat of the reaction.
Meanwhile, the Warriors were angry that James hadn’t gotten any punishment for his act of stepping over Green. And they mocked him for being offended that Green called him a “bitch” in the wake of the move.
“I don’t know how the man feels, but obviously people have feelings and people’s feelings get hurt even if they’re called a bad word,” Klay Thompson said. “I guess his feelings just got hurt.”
Thompson said it minutes after learning Green had been suspended, and his disgust was palpable. What the Warriors said about James privately among each other was clearly much worse.
“I’m not going to comment on what Klay said, because I know where it can go,” James said. “It’s so hard to take the high road. I’ve been doing it for thirteen years. It’s so hard to continue to do it, and I’m going to do it again.”
It did not end there. It quickly spilled onto social media. Marreese Speights, a Warriors backup forward, tweeted a picture of a baby’s bottle, a clear reference to James’s complaining. Then Ayesha Curry, who had become perhaps the highest-profile spouse in the NBA, wrote on her Twitter account, “High road. Invisible bridge used to step over said person when open floor is available to the left and right.”
Again, it wasn’t hard to imagine what was being said in the Curry household about James, especially with the feeling a championship was just hours away.
The next afternoon, Lue was antsy in his hotel room before it was time to leave for the game. He didn’t want to watch ESPN and hear about the series, so he turned on the History Channel and watched a documentary about the Civil War. He couldn’t help connecting what he was watching to his team’s job that night. It was in his head as he addressed the team before they took the floor.
“That happened from 1861 to 1865 and we lost a lot of great men,” he told them. “But the thing that stood out to me was they were just showing how they lined up and they were preparing for war and the guys on the front line, they knew they were going to die, but they were willing to die for the guys behind them and they were willing to die and sacrifice for their country. When you’re on that front line, you got to be prepared and ready to die. Everybody tonight in this locker room has to be prepared and ready to stand on the front line.”
Lue was rolling. “My grandpa taught me a quote a long time ago that everybody can’t walk in the streets, that’s why they made sidewalks,” he barked to the team. “And we got to be the tougher team tonight. We’ve got to show our toughness.”
He closed with this: “The two most important days of your life is when you were born and when you discover the reason why you were born. And I think we were born to be champions. We got a tough road to conquer, but we can do it. We’re down 3–1 but we got to have the mind-set that when we go into this game tonight, we’re going to win.”
“Mark Twain,” Love said after hearing the line.
It was from Twain, but Lue didn’t even know it. He was grabbing at every piece of nineteenth-century motivation he could think of. Players appreciated his sense of calmness; he was always under control on the sidelines and in huddles. It was something he learned playing for Phil Jackson with the Lakers. But behind the scenes, Lue wasn’t afraid to get emotional, as he showed that day at the Trump SoHo late in the season and as he would show several times in Oakland in the coming days.
The crowd that night was peppered with signs supporting Green. Warriors owner Joe Lacob arrived at his courtside seat in a Green jersey, an obvious protest aimed at the NBA officials in the building. Green was barred from the arena but wanted to be close by—if the Warriors won there was to be a party. So he attended the Oakland A’s game being played next door at O.co Coliseum against the Texas Rangers. He rented a suite so he could watch the game, and if the Warriors won, there was a tunnel connecting the stadium and Oracle Arena that he could use to be on the floor in minutes. Warriors general manager Bob Myers joined Green in the suite, as did Marshawn Lynch, an Oakland native.
Hidden in a corner of the arena was staging and graffiti guns for a trophy presentation, which arena officials had practiced that afternoon. Champagne was secretly in a back room being iced and hundreds of Warriors family and friends were there with a party planned after a win. The Warriors were ready.
The Cavs were not. Lue made a strategy change, making James the primary ball handler. This had been a seesaw game since the first days of Irving and James playing together back in the fall of 2014. They’d come a long way, but sometimes things worked better when James just played point guard. It worked again as the change helped free James’s and Irving’s flow. That and they played with newfound determination.
Without Green, their best defender, the Warriors weren’t able to cover as much ground, and James and Irving repeatedly beat them with drives. James had been averaging 21 shots a game in the series, but he took 18 just in the first half of Game 5. He was not going to go down without a fight. Also, his jumper, which had been on hiatus for much of the season, returned, and he drilled two three-pointers. He had 25 points at halftime and Irving had 18 of his own.
But Golden State still looked like too much as Thompson, backing up his words aimed at James, was even better. Known for his ability to go on white-hot shooting streaks, Thompson was doing it again as he nailed six three-pointers and scored 26 points. The game was tied.
Less than two minutes into the second half, J. R. Smith drove to the basket and collided with Warriors center Andrew Bogut. Smith fell into Bogut’s left knee and Bogut collapsed, rolling on the ground in pain. The arena went silent. Myers got up from the suite with Green next door and ran to the arena. Bogut wasn’t much of a scorer and had been benched the year before in the Finals, but he was vitally important as a defender. Without Green, losing Bogut was a huge blow. As Bogut was carried to the locker room it became clear he had a significant injury and would be lost for the series. The Warriors had gotten used to perfect health. But with Curry still not 100 percent on his knee and Green and Bogut gone, they were in unfamiliar territory.
The game changed with the mood, the Cavs quickly opened an 11-point lead as James and Irving kept pounding away on the Warriors’ diminished defense. Thompson finished with 37 points and Curry with 25, but they were subdued in the second half, combining to go 1-of-9 on three-pointers. The Cavs were never in danger again, and cruised to a 15-point win. James and Irving both finished with 41 points, combining to make nine three-pointers.
James added 16 rebounds, seven assists, three steals, and three blocks. It was the first time in Finals history teammates had scored 40 points in the same game. It was also the beginning of a fulfillment of two prophecies: that James and Irving could become a historic tandem, and what Lynn Merritt and James had talked about a week earlier, that James would need to conjure some heroic games. This was a heroic game.
Seeing it reminded Lue of a playoff game when he was an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics in 2012. Trying to close out the Miami Heat at home, the Celtics were crushed by James’s 45 points in what had been the finest game of James’s career. This one might’ve been even better.
With his Boston days on his mind, Lue made a demand in the locker room. Everyone was asked to fork over $100 to him—the players, the coaches, the support staff, the front office members, and even the owners who were there. Cash was produced, those who didn’t have it borrowed from others. When the gathering was over, there was $5,300 that Lue stuffed into an envelope.
“They were all like, ‘Where is the money going?’” Lue said.
Lue took the cash and walked into the coach’s office and got up on the desk. He slid a ceiling panel aside in the dank old building and stuffed the cash inside.
“We’re going to come back, get our money, and get our trophy for Game 7,” he said.
It was something Celtics coach Doc Rivers had done back in 2009 after his team lost badly on Christmas Day to the Lakers. Believing the Lakers would make the Finals, Rivers challenged his team to return to L.A. six months later to get their money back. They did, upsetting James’s Cavs on the way, although the Lakers beat them in the Finals.
History was still against the Cavs. They had pulled to within 3–2, but Green would be back and the Warriors were still confident, believing the James and Irving explosion had been tied to not having their best defensive player. Golden State won Game 6 in Cleveland to win the title the year before, and they were ready to do so again. They rented out a Morton’s Steakhouse for their postgame celebration, as they had the year before, and dozens of friends and family flew with the Warriors to Cleveland to prepare for the celebration.
As tip-off approached, the bus carrying the Warriors family to the arena got stuck in traffic. Then, on its way into the underground parking lot where players and families enter, there was another traffic jam. Ayesha Curry was on the delayed bus and believed it was the Cavs keeping them from getting into the building. She tweeted, “10 mins til game time and the whole team’s families are sitting here on a bus. They won’t let us in yet. Interesting tactic though.”
It was the start of a very frustrating night for both of the Currys. The Cavs’ momentum traveled with them from the West Coast. James was a demon, his legs looking fresh and the strategy of him working at point guard continuing to tear apart the Warriors’ defensive schemes, even with Green back. In the first quarter alone, James scored nine points and handed out four assists that led to nine more.
The Cavs were up 20 after 12 minutes and the Warriors started to show some fatigue, a result of their thinner bench without Bogut and perhaps the carryover from playing a grueling seven-game series in the conference finals. During a stretch in the second half, James scored 18 consecutive points as his aggression and speed were too much. He scored 41 points again, with eight rebounds, 11 assists, four steals, and three blocks.
One of the blocks was on Curry in the fourth quarter. James blocked Curry five times in the Finals, not counting the menacing deadball block in Game 3. On this one James trailed him and didn’t buy a pump fake before swatting it out of bounds. He looked down at the much smaller Curry afterward and fired off a stream of curse words meant to further extenuate the act of dominance. James was putting together a performance for the ages, and he didn’t pass up the chance to rub it in against his top rival both in basketball and business. It was somewhat hypocritical, since it was James who had been offended by Green’s trash talk, but it was clear he didn’t care.
Curry scored 30 points, but it was a miserable night for him. He was called for several questionable fouls. With four minutes left he was called for his disqualifying sixth foul on James on a play that looked harmless. Curry was incensed—rightly so as the foul was not even borderline—and he became so enraged that he took out his mouthpiece and threw it in anger. The plastic smashed Andrew Forbes, the son of Cavs co-owner Nate Forbes, in the chin at his courtside seat.
Throwing an object into the crowd is an automatic ejection, and Curry was sent to the locker room, which was meaningless since he’d already fouled out. All he did was miss the end of the eventual 115–101 final. He was later fined $25,000 by the league for the act.
“I’m happy he threw his mouthpiece,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “He had every right to be upset. He’s the MVP of the league. He gets six fouls called on him, three of them were absolutely ridiculous.”
That got Kerr fined $25,000, the third coach in four series to be fined for complaining about calls against the Cavs. The Warriors, though, felt like there was something against them. First the Green suspension and now the tight officiating on Curry. It seemed like Lue’s complaints worked, so why shouldn’t Kerr try to see what $25,000 would buy him in Game 7, which was now going to happen?
“I’ve lost all respect sorry this is absolutely rigged for money… or ratings not sure which. I won’t be silent. Just saw it live (sorry),” Ayesha Curry tweeted after the game.
It was a touchstone comment for Warriors fans, who felt as if there was a conspiracy after the Green suspension. Her targets seemed off, though, since the league’s payment from TV was fixed no matter how long the series went. The extra game did mean a lot more money, between $15 and $20 million—but for the Game 7 host Warriors for ticket and arena revenue. She was right about the ratings; they were soaring.
She later deleted the tweet and apologized, saying she’d gotten upset because security in the arena had racially profiled her father. It turned out Ayesha’s father resembled a man whom NBA security was on the lookout for after he had successfully used fake credentials to access arenas. After he was questioned and his credentials checked, it was ironed out.
None of it ruffled the Cavs, who behind James had started to believe it was possible.
“This is the highest level of basketball I’ve ever played in my life,” said Irving, who scored 23 points. “I know that Game 7 will be the hardest thing ever.”
Everything had gone against them the year before and they could feel the karma of it turning. And they could feel James, who was backing up his words and setting a lead for his organization to follow.
“Not many people in the history of sports has said, ‘Everyone get on my back: City, state, team, organization, get on my back and I’m going to carry you. If we win or fail, I’ll take the blame, but I’m going to lead you,’” Jefferson said as he marveled at James’s accomplishments. “He is doing this for his teammates. He is doing this for everyone.”