Cleveland Cavaliers Still Have Long Way to Go in Flawed Pursuit of Greatness
CHICAGO — Hanging in the United Center's rafters, directly below the Chicago Bulls' 1995-96 division championship banner, is an add-on emblazoned with No. 72. It's impossible to ignore—a reminder of the legendary team that set the NBA's all-time record for regular-season wins.
After their come-from-behind 100-99 win over the Grizzlies in Memphis on Saturday, the Golden State Warriors are still on pace to pass that historic mark.
And it's not just fans who have their eyes trained on the Warriors. LeBron James, who has spent his entire career chasing that kind of immortality, is well aware of what the Warriors are doing. He's also aware that none of his six NBA Finals teams, even the two championship Miami squads, have reached that historic level of dominance.
"My best year was 66-16 [in 2008-09 and 2012-13]," James said Saturday morning at the Cleveland Cavaliers' shootaround, hours before a 105-102 loss to the Bulls. "When I look back on it, I can remember a few games that we lost that we should have won. But then there were a few that we should have lost that we were able to come back and win, so that was a really good season for us that year.
"I don't know if I've ever been on a team that said, 'Let's go for the record,' we'll just have to see what happens. I guess we were six games away from tying [the Bulls' record]."
The closest James has come to playing on a team at that level was the 2012-13 Miami Heat, which won 66 games, including 27 in a row, the third-longest streak in league history. That group beat the San Antonio Spurs in a seven-game Finals series.
But even that Heat squad, at the height of its winning streak, was never what the 2015-16 Warriors are. The players didn't have this air of inevitability, and they didn't capture the world's imagination the way Stephen Curry's Warriors have.
The same is true of James' current Cavaliers group, which in any other year would arguably be title favorites. At 56-24, the Cavs have the Eastern Conference's best record despite all kinds of roadblocks, like the January firing of head coach David Blatt.
There are teams in the East that match up well with the Cavs—the Heat and Atlanta Hawks—but none that pose a true threat to keep James from his sixth consecutive Finals appearance.
Yet the Cavs are still an imperfect group.
Kevin Love's fit with the rest of the Cavs' big men has always been awkward, and there are persistent rumblings that James and Kyrie Irving aren't on the same page. But because of James' presence, they have the best player in any matchup they'll face during the first three rounds of the playoffs, which counts for enough.
"I think we've played some really good ball as of late," James said Saturday morning. "Besides the loss the other night [to the Indiana Pacers, a game in which James sat], I don't think we took a step backward. We've played some really good ball the last couple [of] weeks, guys are just gearing in and focusing in and understanding. We've got three games left, but the postseason is one week from now. Guys are looking forward to the challenge."
The Cavs controlled much of the first three quarters and entered the final period leading by three, but they were done in by a cold shooting stretch (as a team, they shot 6-of-18 in the quarter) and five turnovers leading to six Chicago points.
"When we were up 11, Kevin got the rebound and threw a bad pass and then they came down and scored," Cavs coach Tyronn Lue said after the game. "And then LeBron came back with a turnover and they scored again and pushed the lead to seven. We just have to find a way to get the momentum back in a situation like that."
The Cavs clawed back in the final minutes, before J.R. Smith missed a three-pointer at the buzzer that would have sent it to overtime. With a win, the Cavs would have locked up the Eastern Conference's No. 1 seed. They would have had the luxury of resting players for the season's final two games. Instead, they enter the home stretch with work still to do.
This feeling of unfinished business, of missed opportunities, has haunted the Cavaliers all season long.
It was always going to be an uphill battle for James' merely very good Cavs team to keep pace in an eventual Finals matchup with the Warriors, who, when they're locked in, look as dominant as any team the sport has ever seen. James fully recognizes the significance of what the Warriors are doing and doesn't think it diminishes anything about the '96 Bulls.
"Records are made to be broken," James said. "That doesn't mean if your record is broken anyone should think less of you. You have rushing records that get broken, you have home run records that get broken, you have 100-yard dash records that are broken.
"You have all type of records that are broken, but no one ever looks down upon the record that's broken. You actually praise it even more. You say, 'Wow, they really did that?' So having Golden State in a position where if they win three in a row, they can break that record, it's pretty cool."
While the Warriors chase history, James is left to watch just like everybody else, still looking up at a historic juggernaut that, for all his many accomplishments, is aiming for heights he has yet to experience or give up pursuing.
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