Cavaliers Haven't Lost Control, but They've Given Raptors Reason to Believe
TORONTO — LeBron James is a man of many and varied talents. Playmaker. Scorer. Leader. Pitchman. On Saturday night, he was a jukebox.
One moment, he was singing a cheesy 1980s pop song. Minutes later, he was quoting a Jay Z lyric.
So, no, the first sign of playoff distress did not seem to be having much of an adverse effect on Cleveland's multifaceted star, or his Cavaliers compatriots.
A second failure? That might be something else entirely.
The Cavs are undefeated no longer, having been dealt a 99-84 loss by the Toronto Raptors on Saturday, their first setback of the 2016 postseason. Their playoff record is still a dominant 10-1. They remain in command of the Eastern Conference Finals, two games to one. Their return to the NBA Finals is still taken as a given.
Yet Monday night's Game 4 stands as a minor moment of truth, nonetheless.
To wit: Are the Cavaliers truly the dominant, swaggering team of destiny they appeared to be over the prior five weeks? Are they cohesive and coherent enough to put down this insurrection quickly? Was Saturday's loss a momentary blip, or a warning sign?
The answers are, in all likelihood: "Yes, "yes" and "blip." A win Monday night would likely enshrine those beliefs. But a loss? A 2-2 tie? Against a battered and less-talented team? That, as they say, would be different.
It's fair to wonder about the alternate scenarios, and what it might mean for Cleveland's title hopes.
These are, after all, the same Cavaliers who staggered through parts of the regular season, who got their coach fired in January and who struggled to find the right balance and chemistry among their stars.
Taken as a snapshot, Saturday night looked more like a Cavaliers game from late winter than early spring.
There was Kyrie Irving, overdribbling and forcing shots. There was Kevin Love, disappearing from the scene. There were the Cavaliers, shrinking from Bismack Biyombo's physicality, unable to match his vigor or his joyfulness.
And there were the Raptors—their starting center in street clothes, their star point guard in foul trouble, their top LeBron defender ailing—rolling to a double-digit victory and reclaiming belief.
Irving (3-of-19 from the field) and Love (1-of-9) were less than ordinary, leaving James on an island—as he was last June, when he was indeed the only Cavs star on the court. For the first time since the playoffs began, Cleveland looked ordinary, mortal, maybe even vulnerable.
Not that James seemed overly troubled by this blemish on the postseason ledger.
While waiting for his turn at the podium, James sat in his locker stall at the Air Canada Centre, wearing sunglasses and singing—in falsetto—the chorus to Canadian Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night."
J.R. Smith walked through, also wearing sunglasses, with a baseball cap sitting askew on his head, and James jokingly threatened not to take the podium with him looking that way.
When they did take the podium (sans hat and sunglasses), James was asked about avoiding retaliation after a physical play—an allusion to Biyombo's fourth-quarter flagrant foul—and James responded with more lyrics.
"I always think back to the Jay Z phrase and a line he had: 'If I shoot you, then I'm brainless; if you shoot me, you're famous. What am I to do?'" James said, quoting from "The Streets is Watching."
The only sign of tension James allowed to seep out was in response to a question about whether he tried to "sell a call"—i.e. flop—after getting smacked in the face amid a skirmish between Cleveland's Tristan Thompson and Toronto's DeMarre Carroll. But James met that question with more annoyance than alarm.
As it happened, the blow was inadvertently delivered by Thompson, James' teammate, a bit of friendly fire. The bigger blows were delivered by Biyombo, who continued his breakout series with a 26-rebound, four-block performance, by DeMar DeRozan, who tore through the Cavs for 32 points and by Kyle Lowry, who shrugged off foul trouble for 20 points.
It's easy enough to dismiss it all as just a bad night for the Cavaliers, especially when viewed against their run of dominance through the earlier rounds, with sweeps of Detroit and Atlanta.
But winning streaks can be deceptive, masking a team's deficiencies. Are the Cavaliers as dominant as they recently appeared? Or did they just get on a roll against mediocre competition? Did the winning sharpen them, or dull their senses and leave them overconfident?
"A little adversity," James called it, and it's been a while since the Cavaliers have dealt with any. It's fair to wonder how they will handle it.
All the talk for the past week had been whether the Cavaliers could go undefeated through the East bracket and how much rest they would get before the Finals.
No one gave Toronto a chance when this series began, owing to Cleveland's 8-0 playoff record and the Raptors' loss of center Jonas Valanciunas to an injured ankle. Throw in the questionable health of Carroll—acquired last summer to be LeBron's shadow, but still recovering from midseason knee surgery—and there was little reason to believe the Raptors could provide much resistance.
"Everybody thought we were going to get swept," Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. "I think that fuels us."
This is all new to the Raptors and their delirious fans—their first conference finals appearance, their first conference finals home game, their first conference finals victory.
They are emboldened now, not just by the margin of victory, but by the means. The Raptors are convinced they can get the shots they want, whenever they want them, against the Cavs' defense; they just have to convert them, as they did in Game 3. They believe. And belief can be a powerful thing.
Howard Beck covers the NBA for Bleacher Report and is a co-host of NBA Sunday Tip, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. ET, on SiriusXM Bleacher Report radio. Follow him on Twitter, @HowardBeck.
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