14. 2015 – Golden State Warriors over Cleveland Cavaliers (4-2)
I’m probably higher on this series than most, but they say styles make fights and the styles of each team couldn’t have been more opposite in this series once Kyrie Irving went down with a knee injury in Game 1 and never returned.
Irving’s knee injury paired with a shoulder injury to Kevin Love that forced him out of essentially the entire playoff run led to a drastic change in the Cavs’ playing style on the fly. Instead of the finesse, offensive-oriented basketball they’d been playing all year, they had to quickly pivot to a slower style and use their size to impose their will on the backboards while LeBron James shouldered virtually all of the offensive workload.
The Cavs were never going to win four games with this strategy, but it still kind of worked. LeBron’s control over the pace of the series combined with the rebounding dominance of Timofey Mozgov and Tristan Thompson made these games just ugly enough for the Cavs to hang around and even take a 2-1 lead.
But the battle for control of the pace is really the most intriguing chess match in this series. When the Warriors were able to push the pace enough to get the scoring into triple-digits they were 4-0. However, when the Cavs were able to keep the game under 100 points, they were 2-0.
This was a decimated Cavs team, a Warriors team that didn’t feel ready to win a championship yet, and an old school style of basketball. On the surface, it’s not very enticing, but the contrasting styles make nearly every game of this series interesting to watch and pave the way for some unlikely players to step up. It’s worth watching.