2. 2016 – Cleveland Cavaliers over Golden State Warriors (4-3)
If you want to look at this series from start to finish, it’s really not all that entertaining. Games 1-6 are all relative blowouts, but Game 7 is so good that you can’t rank this series any lower than second.
The last five minutes of Game 7 are easily the tensest stretch of basketball I’ve ever watched. At the 4:39 mark of this game, Klay Thompson makes a layup that ties the game at 89. From that point on neither team scores for almost a full four minutes until Kyrie Irving hits his famous jumper over Steph Curry. But throughout that entire scoring drought, the tension in the building makes it so entertaining to watch.
And even though Games 5 and 6 aren’t really nail-biters like Game 7, they are still worth watching for the individual excellence of Kyrie Irving and LeBron James who completely take over the series after going down 3-1.
Also if you like some unintentional comedy, you get a Draymond incident in Game 4 that suspends him for Game 5, and Steph Curry getting ejected from Game 6 after throwing his mouthpiece at a fan – which has to be the most disgusting thing that you could get hit with at a basketball game.