The day before Game 7, a van pulled up to the Cavs’ hotel and a group piled in. This had been arranged by Ty Lue, and he was joined by two of his assistant coaches, James Posey and Mike Longabardi. Rich Paul, LeBron James’s agent, came after he heard about the trip, curious about the destination. So did Lue’s good friend Chauncey Billups, who was in town covering the series as an analyst for ESPN, along with a couple of team staffers and Lue’s cousin “Doodles.”
The van headed north, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on one of those sunny and clear days where the bay sparkles and San Francisco becomes one of the most picturesque places in the world. They took Route 101, passing Sausalito and into Marin County and all its chic towns with bay views and high-end shopping promenades. They exited the highway and rolled up to a heavily guarded gate at the front of San Quentin State Prison.
It had been a day of tension. There was a light practice in Oakland at the Warriors’ facility, which sits on top of a parking deck attached to a downtown hotel. There was the fulfillment of media obligations. The worldwide press was salivating because the storylines were delicious. It was either going to be the completion of the greatest season in league history if the Warriors won, or it was going to be the greatest comeback in Finals history.
Lue wanted to get away and out of the city. Between Games 1 and 2 of the series, he had taken a mental break by going over to Alcatraz for a few hours. He wasn’t in the mood for tourist activities now. Instead there would be a field trip, an unusual and unexpected one for any person, much less a man about to coach Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
One of Lue’s financial advisers had a connection to San Quentin’s warden. It was not going to be a perfunctory tour of the oldest prison in the state of California, consistently home to the largest death row annual count in the country.
After the crew showed their IDs and heard the prison door shut with a thud behind them, a member of the traveling party noticed a sign that read “Inbounds.” This caught his eye, of course, because it is a common basketball term. When he asked a guard for an explanation for the sign, he was informed, “Now you are officially part of the prison.”
As the group made its way through the premises, they found it to be unsettlingly quiet for a place that housed some 4,000 inmates.
“Where’s everybody at?” Lue asked.
“Right now they’re being counted,” responded a guard.
“What do they do when they’re done being counted?” Lue replied.
“They come out here,” said the guard.
“Out here where?” Lue asked again.
“With us,” the guard said.
The group did the math. There were seven or eight of them with one security guard, and thousands of prisoners—many of them convicted of heinous crimes such as kidnapping, rape, and murder—were about to be released into the yard where they were taking their tour. And here they thought the most dangerous thing they’d face all weekend was defending Steph Curry in the open court.
At that moment, a siren went off signifying the count was finished and the prisoners were free to roam from their cells.
The fear the group felt from the seemingly dicey situation quickly subsided. As they were recognized by the prisoners, the feeling turned from sinister to banter. Warriors fans in the yard talked trash. Cavs fans shouted out support. Lakers fans cheered the former backup point guard for the purple and gold, and Lue, naturally, heard about the iconic moment when Allen Iverson stepped over him during the 2001 Finals. Billups’s credentials as “Mr. Big Shot” from his championship days with the Detroit Pistons were called out as some prisoners boasted about their jumpers being more accurate.
Here Lue was, in the midst of some of the most hardened criminals on the face of the earth, and the game of basketball—just like it had always been—was his guiding compass.
He thought about the obvious difference between his lot in life and theirs and couldn’t help but marvel at the moment being shared. It brought to mind a familiar refrain: Sports bring everybody together. No matter the race, religion, economic background, or in this case, freedom, sports provide a common language to speak, a common distraction from life’s complications.
Lue came to the prison looking for an escape from the pressure surrounding the winner-take-all Game 7 and was reminded that the Finals—just a series of basketball games, after all—were serving as an escape for so many others bound to a bleak existence in jail.
Once the trash talk died down, Lue, Billups, and the rest of the group were thanked repeatedly for paying a visit. Talking hoops was therapeutic, the prisoners said. Their mere presence brightened their day, they added.
When the trip ended and the group made the ride back to San Francisco, Lue’s mind was back on Game 7, but the dire consequences attached to it all didn’t seem quite so significant.
Much like he had done before Game 5, Lue addressed the team the next day, but this time his message wasn’t shaped by Mark Twain or the History Channel. It was straight out of San Quentin.
“This could have been any one of us,” he told the Cavs in his pregame speech. “The warden said 80 percent of the guys in there may not have ever committed another crime, but just one bad night, one bad car ride, one bad fight or whatever and you could be in there. And from the environments we come from, it could have been any one of us.
“You’re riding with a friend, and he’s got drugs on him. Or you get in an accident and panic and it’s a hit-and-run. Or anything. So we got to take advantage of our opportunities in life. We are in a special place that can bring people together. Don’t take it for granted.”
By the time tip-off came, the Warriors starting lineup perfectly illustrated Lue’s point about just how precarious these chances could be. In at center was Festus Ezeli, Andrew Bogut’s backup, for his first start of the postseason.
Steve Kerr went small in Game 6 without Bogut and started Draymond Green at center. It didn’t work and Golden State was blown out of the building. A change wasn’t surprising, nor was it surprising to see the Cavs score the first points of the game on a dump-off pass in the lane from Kyrie Irving to Tristan Thompson, with Thompson powering right through Ezeli’s chest to give Cleveland a 2–0 lead.
For a series that had been decided by an average margin of victory of 19.7 points for the winning team in Games 1–6, Game 7 finally, mercifully, had the feeling early on that it was going to be a tight one worth watching. And people watched. The game had an average viewership of 30.8 million, making it one of the most watched in the history of the sport. By the fourth quarter, more than 40 million Americans were watching, with millions more around the world tuning in at various times of the day.
When Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green hit back-to-back 3s to take an 8–4 lead—a duo that scored a combined eight points in Game 6—Oracle started to shake. But rather than capitalize on that momentum, Klay Thompson airballed a transition three, Ezeli was blocked at the rim, and Kevin Love scored a layup after missing a couple of point-blank attempts and getting his own rebound, drawing the score to 8–6 and allowing the Cavs to settle back into the game.
By the end of the first quarter, the Cavs were up 23–22. Cleveland was pounding the Warriors on the glass, 16–8, and owning the inside, outscoring Golden State 16–4 in the paint. Meanwhile, the Warriors went 5-for-11 from three while the Cavs were 0-for-4 from deep. Cleveland got back into the series by playing the same uptempo pace as Golden State and just doing it better, but Game 7 was regressing back along the NBA’s traditional East Coast–West Coast contrasting styles.
The second quarter was a disaster for the Cavs. As if making up for his Game 5 suspension all at once, Green exploded for 15 points. He made one three-pointer and another, screaming and waving his arms in part defiance and part joy. James wasn’t guarding him close enough, looking to help Cav defenders elsewhere; he was sluggish and perhaps a bit disrespectful of Green’s range. Green hit two more three-pointers, now four in a row. Green, who’d been the goat for a few days, threw his shoulders back and shook his head as he sniffed the hero role.
The Cavs couldn’t match it. Their legs looked shaky and they missed nine of the 10 three-pointers they put up in the quarter. They only hung on with toughness, extra rebounds, and James and Irving bullying points near the basket and at the foul line. So it was still a one-point game with a little more than three minutes remaining before the half.
The script was easy to follow for most fans and analysts alike watching it play out. However, there was something Lue saw on the court that was bothering him more than the open shots his team was missing. Late in the second quarter, James came to the bench and Lue approached him.
“What’s wrong with your body language?” Lue asked. “You got to pick your body language up.”
James demurred. “I’m good. I’m in a good place.”
“Well, your body language is not showing that,” Lue shot back.
“Coach, I’m good,” James insisted.
Lue was going to leave it at that, but James’s inconsistent play continued. It didn’t matter to Lue that James was either leading or tied with a teammate for the lead in points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks up to that point in the game. Lue, a former teammate of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, knew there was more he could give.
In the final timeout before halftime, Lue went back to challenging James, only this time it was in front of the entire team.
“Bron, you got to be better!” he implored. “If we’re going to win, you got to be better.”
James, again, was incredulous. “What you talking about?” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“You got to be better!” Lue repeated.
“What do you want me to do?” James asked, clearly perturbed.
“I want you to guard Draymond, I want you to shoot your open shots, I want you to be aggressive and stop turning the ball over,” Lue rattled off. “Is there anything else?”
The speech didn’t take. At least at first. James coughed up his fourth turnover of the half—Golden State as a team only had five—that led to a Leandro Barbosa three and the Warriors’ biggest lead of the game, up 47–40 with 2:08 remaining.
James added to his first-half output a badly missed pull-up three that came on an isolation possession before the buzzer sounded. Cleveland trailed 49–42.
There were 24 minutes separating either the greatest comeback in Finals history or simply more soul-crushing disappointment for both the city of Cleveland and for James personally. James’s third consecutive Finals defeat was very much in play.
When his team got to the locker room, Lue went in on James once again. It was James, by averaging 41 points, 12 rebounds, nine assists, 3.5 steals, and three blocks in Games 5 and 6, who had gotten the Cavs this far. It would have to be James to take them all the way.
“Bron, you got to be better,” Lue said. “You can get mad if you want. You can smack your lips, whatever you want to do, but you got to be better. You’re the leader of this team, you got to be better.”
Next he turned to Kyrie Irving, who was tied up with Stephen Curry with nine points apiece. “And Kyrie, I want you to be aggressive, but you got to take better shots,” Lue said. “I don’t mind your shots but you got to take better shots. Be aggressive!”
Lue kept his words short and retreated to the coach’s office, giving the players time to ready themselves.
James was fuming. One of the team’s security guards, who worked with James in both Miami and Cleveland, later told Lue that he had never seen anyone speak to James like that before.
First, James found Damon Jones, his former teammate during his first stint with the Cavs, who had joined the team as a special assistant for the playoffs after spending the year working with their D-League affiliate, the Canton Charge.
“D-Jones, your boy is on some bullshit!” James said.
“Who are you talking about?” Jones asked. “What’s going on?”
“Man, T-Lue, he should never question me,” James said. “All the effort I give?”
Jones is more than just a former teammate of James’s. He is a friend. But he didn’t blindly take his friend’s side.
“Listen, I haven’t been here all year, but everything I read, I see on TV, you talk about how ‘Coach Lue is our leader, he’s so poised, he gives us confidence, we believe in him,’” Jones said. “That’s all I’ve seen all year about how much you believe in him and how much you trust him.
“So, why not trust him now?”
James was stumped.
“Fuck you, man,” he said. “You right, you right… Fuck you.”
Still, he needed further affirmation, so he went to another Jones—James Jones—who has been around him forever, making the last six trips to the Finals with him side by side as a teammate in both Miami and Cleveland.
“Man, I can’t believe T-Lue would say that,” James began.
“LeBron, is he lying?” James Jones asked.
“No, man, but…” James’s voice trailed off.
“Well, there’s your answer,” James Jones said.
LeBron James had heard enough.
“Fuck y’all!” he said and made his way out of the locker room, back through the tunnel, and onto the court to prep for the biggest half of basketball of his life.
The third quarter started much the way the second quarter ended. As big as this opportunity was for the Cleveland side of things, the Warriors were playing at home where they went 39–2 during the regular season. And even if Curry looked a level below his unanimous-MVP status, they still had Klay Thompson, the guy who got the Warriors to the Finals in the first place with 41 points in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder as Golden State was on its way to its own comeback from a 3–1 series deficit.
The Cavs quickly cut the Warriors’ lead to three, but Thompson scored five straight points on a long pull-up three and a fadeaway jumper over Love to increase the cushion back to eight. With Curry slogging through yet another off shooting night—on his way to failing to connect on better than 40 percent of his shot attempts for the fourth time in the series—Thompson seemed like he would be able to carry the added weight.
The scoreboard read 54–46 in favor of the Warriors after the flurry. In the bowels of the arena in a hidden corner, a bin of champagne bottles now on ice with reams of plastic and tarps that would be used to seal the lockers and floors to protect the winning locker room from damage waited for guidance. It was positioned between the locker rooms, and at this point it looked like it was headed down the carpeted hallway toward the home team and not the bland concrete path to the visitors’ room.
But in the next 100 seconds, the score was suddenly tied thanks to Irving and the man his teammates called “Swish.”
J. R. Smith, the Cleveland wildcard, had been maligned for wilting on the Finals stage a year ago. With the stakes at their highest, he got the Cavs back in it, canning threes on consecutive possessions. Irving added a layup, blowing by the much slower Ezeli.
Whether it was Lue’s halftime speech that did it this time around or not, the Cavs were a different team when staring at elimination. James came out in the third quarter after Lue’s direct challenge and put up five assists against zero turnovers. After getting a green light from his coach,, Irving scored 12 third quarter points—more than Curry’s and Thompson’s 10 points combined in the period. The Cavs regained control of the game, building a seven-point margin of their own before the Warriors rallied to take back the lead heading into the fourth quarter, 76–75.
At this point, the magnitude spiked tenfold. This wasn’t just the culmination of a long season or twelve months building toward a Finals rematch. Because of the stakes and the size of the audience, what was happening in these minutes was career-defining. These would be the events that would adorn walls, run endlessly on highlight shows, and, perhaps, create nightmares.
With so much intensity, pressure, and even fatigue, separation between the teams was impossible. The Cavs and Warriors traded baskets as the seconds, and then minutes, ticked off the clock. Golden State pushed ahead by four just past the halfway point of the period, but James responded with six straight points. The Warriors immediately tied it with a Thompson basket.
Through nearly 333 minutes played in the Finals, the cumulative score between Cleveland and Golden State was 699 to 699. The first to 700 would end up winning it all. And getting there was exhausting and excruciating.
For the next two and half minutes, tense and tired offense met resolute defense. Nine shots went up between the two teams and nine shots went awry. LeBron missed three times, falling into the isolation that is a signature of high-pressure moments. But Curry missed too, as did Thompson, Green, and Iguodala. There were no timeouts called. Back and forth they went, the building tensing each time a shot went into the air.
In Cleveland, more than 15,000 were watching inside Quicken Loans Arena, squeezing into seats around the construction of the stage for the Republican National Convention. Outside, thousands more watched on giant screens, craning out of parking decks, and herding around televisions at bars across downtown. Each shot meant tension and release as it missed.
The ninth miss came on a floater by Irving with two minutes left and the scoreboard still locked at 89–89. He’d gotten a matchup with Curry and tried to exploit it, but his touch was off. Iguodala came out with the ball and tore off to the other end, trying to manufacture a scoring chance with speed. It was a smart play—the Cavs were sluggish—and it quickly turned into a two-on-one fast break with Iguodala speeding down the floor along with Curry and only Smith back for the Cavs.
No one running the floor or watching it unfold could have known this, but what was about to happen would end up becoming a signature moment. A play standing still on its own from the mess that came before it, frozen in time as one of the single most dominant defensive plays in league history by one of the league’s single most dominant players forever more.
Iguodala picked up his dribble and tossed a chest pass ahead to Curry, who caught the pass and immediately fed it right back, bouncing the ball off the floor as he followed the fundamentals of executing a fast break. Iguodala caught it in stride on his way to the hoop. At this point, Smith was scrambling to defend both players and committing a foul wouldn’t have been the worst decision. Because of the pass, Iguodala had an angle on him.
What Smith didn’t see was James in a dead sprint to get back into the play. One of the fastest ever to play because of his long strides, James made up ground, but was still three or four feet behind as Iguodala took to the air with the ball in his right hand. Smith stuck his hands straight up, not fouling, and Iguodala adjusted, moving around him to get a clear shot.
It was clear. And then it wasn’t.
James came steaming into the lane, zooming past Curry with his eyes wide in a mix of determination and desperation. He flung both hands into the air, not knowing what the crafty Iguodala was going to do, which side of the basket he was going to go to. But Smith, in addition to slowing Iguodala slightly, shielded the approaching James from Iguodala’s view and he never saw it coming.
It happened so fast that people in the arena couldn’t even clearly see what took place. James pinned Iguodala’s shot against the backboard. It went from a sure hoop, and a Warriors lead on their home floor, to nothing.
James had executed chasedown blocks dozens of times over the years, but nothing like this. It may have instantly become the single greatest play of his career. It combined all his talents—his speed, his size, his athleticism, his competitiveness, his intelligence—to size up the angles and close the distance.
“I would definitely rank it No. 1,” James told Business Insider later that summer. “Just because of the magnitude of the game, what was going on at that point in the game and I had to run through a couple guys, and get around a couple guys to get to that position. You know, it was a big moment, not only for that particular moment in the game, but for Cleveland sports history. Now that you can kind of look back on it, a lot of people are saying that.
“For me, I think a lot of people will base a game-winning jump shot, or a dunk, or something that happened offensively [as their most memorable play]. For a staple play for my legacy to be a block, something defensively to help us win, that’s the ultimate for me.”
It would become known as “The Block.”
By that point in the game, James already had registered a triple double, joining Jerry West and James Worthy as just the third player in league history with a triple double in Game 7 of the Finals. He was, as Lue implored him to be at halftime, much “better.”
As significant as it felt in the moment, it was still a tied game. The Block had perhaps saved the game, but it didn’t win it. Both teams missed again, including Curry, who was unable to summon the magic he had all season, as he badly missed a three, shooting it so far right that it hit nothing but backboard. Lue called a timeout with 1:09 left, the teams now having missed 12 straight shots.
As Lue huddled with his coaches to ponder the play call, James sat on the bench with Irving standing alongside him. Smith sat next to James, cursing about the previous few plays. James tried to look around Irving to catch Lue’s eye. As Lue walked to the huddle holding his clipboard, James pointed at Irving.
As great as James had been all series and all game, he and Lue agreed to set the play up for Irving to have the ball. Lue designed a play that would isolate Irving on Curry. Lue figured with the rhythm Irving showed in the second half, combined with the beating Curry had taken all series long, the Cavs’ point guard would have a quickness advantage matched up against the two-time MVP and would be able to get by him on his way to the basket, where he’d either have a layup or the chance to draw a foul. Lue made a sub, putting Richard Jefferson in for Tristan Thompson. It took the best rebounder off the floor but would force the Warriors to guard Jefferson outside the paint, the idea being to open driving space for Irving.
Lue called for the Cavs to run “Horns,” a favorite play of his old coach, Phil Jackson. Only the ball wasn’t going to Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. It was going to Kyrie Irving.
“He wants to come out every night and destroy his opponent,” Lue later explained. “We knew and he knew we had confidence in him to take that shot. I thought he was going to go to the basket. We had the matchup we wanted, but he took a three-point shot. But he’s been making that shot his whole career.”
“Horns” did its job. A pick set by Smith forced a switch of defenders and moved the bigger Klay Thompson off Irving and got Curry on him. As soon as Irving got Curry on him, he dribbled backwards a few steps toward the Oracle Arena logo at center court, putting the two on an island.
Curry backpedaled as Irving slowly approached the three-point line. Irving dribbled through his legs to his right, then through his legs to his left, then back through to his right. He was probing Curry. While dribbling the ball with his right hand, he executed a hesitation dribble to his right. It surprised Curry for a split second—typically when right-handed players go into a shot they cross the ball over from their left hand to their right to get it in shooting position. But Irving hopped right and immediately went up with the ball in his right hand. It was awkward but the kind of thing Irving practiced all the time, one of his little tricks to open space. It wasn’t much, an extra foot or two, but it freed him up to launch a clean shot from deep on the right side, beyond the three-point line.
Curry raised an arm to contest, but Irving—near the spot on the court where he fractured his kneecap in overtime of Game 1 of the Finals a year before—faded away to create the shooting angle. James stood in the corner as the shot went up, contorting his body along with the path of the ball as it made its way toward the rim, trying to will it in.
It fell through the net. Finally the ice broke, and it put the Cavs up by three, 92–89, leaving only 53 seconds on the clock between Cleveland and an end to a fifty-two-year championship curse.
It became known as “The Shot.”
Feeling the pressure, the Warriors designed a similar play for their star guard, Curry. Just like the Cavs did on their previous possession, the Warriors ran a high pick-and-roll between Curry and Green, hoping Cleveland would switch, and they did. Irving switched onto Green, leaving Love matched up one-on-one against Curry a few feet beyond the three-point arc.
Numerous times over the previous two seasons Love had been benched late in games because of his defensive issues. He often struggled covering his own man, much less one of the most elusive players in the league. It was thought with this exact weakness—that he could be attacked as the weak defensive link—he wouldn’t even be on the floor at the end of games against the Warriors. Yet here he was, on Curry with a championship on the line.
Curry started looking for an opening for a three-pointer to tie the game. The 6-foot-10 Love shuffled his feet, beating the 6-foot-3 Curry to the spot he was dribbling toward and forcing Curry to cross the ball over and head back to his right. Love’s momentum was taking him out of the play, but he quickly steadied himself and recovered and was able to get Curry back in front of him. Curry passed it to Green on the right wing to reset and Green tossed it right back to Curry, now some 40 feet from the basket. Love looked to see if he could switch back to defend Green, but no, he was out by himself to manage Curry.
For most players, the thought of pulling up from that far away from the basket with the game on the line would be absurd. But Curry isn’t most players. He made virtually the same shot to beat Oklahoma City at the buzzer during the regular season.
So Curry pump-faked, and Love, thinking the Warriors superstar could very well shoot it from that deep, jumped off his feet. With Love off balance, Curry dribbled to his left and then crossed it over back quickly to his right. Love scrambled, his feet moving faster than any of his teammates had ever seen. He kept his eyes locked on Curry’s, trying to keep up. After nearly 14 long seconds with Love on him, Curry finally launched a three-pointer. Love was in position and he reached up his arm, blocking Curry’s vision.
Curry could’ve made the shot. One of the greatest shooters of all time with unmatched confidence, he could’ve made the shot in the dark. But Love made it tough. And the pressure made it tougher. And the shot missed off the rim with 30.7 seconds left, James zipping in to grab the rebound. The Cavs had the ball and, thanks to Love’s work, they still had the lead. The championship was in sight.
It became known as “The Stop.”
James, Irving, and Love. The trio who’d come together and stayed together to try to reach this moment. All the meetings, the social media, the injuries, the coaching battles, the controversies, the doubts. They were there together and each of them had delivered their own championship moment.
Irving rushed up the floor to try and get an easy basket to seal it, but the Warriors recovered, Iguodala blocking him at the rim. The ball was slapped right back at Irving as he was careening out of bounds, but he was able to save it without stepping on the baseline and lobbed it back out to a trailing Love beyond the three-point line with 22.4 seconds left.
The Warriors had a foul to give and used it to stop the clock. James inbounded the ball back to Irving, who again drove straight for the hoop, only this time found James with a perfect pass as he exploded into the lane. James leapt off the floor after receiving the pass, aiming to power dunk the ball in what probably would’ve been dubbed “The Dunk” had it been allowed to happen.
With no choice, Green met him in the air and fouled him hard. And clean. But it caused James to miss and tumble to the court, bracing his fall with his right wrist and elbow with 10.6 seconds left. In 2002, when James was seventeen, he broke his left wrist on a play similar to it, as he was undercut on a dunk. In 2010 he developed an issue with his right elbow, and for years since he’d worn a sleeve to help protect it.
James was awarded two free throws, but as he writhed on the ground in pain, clutching his right wrist—the one that controls his shooting hand—a doomsday scenario started to play out in the minds of the downtrodden Cleveland fan base once again. James slammed his left fist on the court in both frustration and pain. What if he couldn’t shoot the free throws?
Cleveland called its last timeout as members of the medical staff—head trainer Steve Spiro and James’s personal trainer Mike Mancias among them—rushed all the way down the floor from the Cavs bench to attend to James on the opposite baseline.
James was able to stay in the game after the timeout and made his way to the free throw line, still wincing in pain as he held his wrist in his left hand and rotated it. He shot his first free throw… and missed it. Nothing but the back of the rim. Another miss and the Warriors could get the rebound with two timeouts remaining and a chance to tie.
He stepped off the line, pulled up his jersey to wipe the sweat off his face, adjusted his arm sleeve, wiped the sweat off his hands onto the back of his shorts, and went back to receive the ball from the referee. The crowd hissed, trying to will another miss. This time he made it, rattling it in.
The Warriors called timeout, down 93–89 with 10.6 seconds left. James momentarily put both fists in the air, just as he did ever so briefly after Irving made three less than a minute earlier, before bringing them down and simply holding up the index finger on his right hand.
“One stop,” James said. “One stop. One fucking stop. One fucking stop.”
Lue took over the huddle. All series long, as it played out over the course of nearly three weeks, Lue used whatever practice, shootaround, and walk-through time the team had to drill end-of-game situations.
Only with each of the first six games of the series being decided by 10 or more points, the Cavs never had a chance to implement what Lue was teaching. It became a running gag within the team even, causing Irving and Iman Shumpert to razz their coach for spending so much time on something they never got a chance to use.
This was their chance, however. One defensive possession stood between Lue’s team and the NBA title and it was playing out right in front of him and the rest of the Cavs bench.
It was merely a formality.
Curry missed a three—his fourth consecutive miss of the quarter to finish his night 6-for-19 from the field—with 3.4 seconds left. The Warriors got the offensive rebound with 2.2 seconds left, but there was no four-point line for him to try to tie the game.
The game was over. The Cavs were champs. The city of Cleveland was a winner. And LeBron James, at long last, had delivered on his promise of a title for his hometown.
James was back on the floor, hammering it again with his fist, this time in joy.
“Cleveland,” he said with tears in his eyes, “this is for you.”