By Grant Hughes,
Bounding up the floor after his fourth made three-pointer of the first quarter, Stephen Curry unleashed a primal scream. It contained no discernible words, but it conveyed a message: TheGolden State Warriors, having faced adversity for the first time all season, would not fold.
The Warriors, losers in two of their last three outings, obliterated theCleveland Cavaliers on Monday by a final score of 132-98, building a 13-point first-period lead into a 26-point advantage at halftime. The margin ballooned into the 40s as the exhibition (for it was no longer anything resembling a contest) stretched into the final stanza.
It was a statement win—one that reaffirmed Golden State's dominance and proved the roughest patch of the season was merely a wakeup call.
It was also a new low for a team led by LeBron James, according toNBA on ESPN:
Stephen Curry led all scorers with 35 points on 12-of-18 shooting, while Draymond Green contributed 16 points, 10 assists, seven rebounds and incalculable joules of energy. James scored just 16 points, and neither Kevin Love (three points) nor Kyrie Irving (eight points) did anything to suggest their presences in last year's Finals would have made a difference—even if Irving once contended otherwise.
Sequences like this helped highlight why, per BBall Breakdown:
Golden State secured a 2-0 season sweep of the Cavs in a terrifying display of basketball ruthlessness, effectively ending the game at halftime by finding the focused, consistently intense style that had eluded it for most of the past six weeks.
Shaun Livingston's comments to Ethan Sherwood Strauss of ESPN.com suggested the Warriors remembered who they were:
And based on what James told Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com, the Cavs are not yet who they'd like to be:
The pick-and-roll decisions were crisp, and Curry's ultra-confident gunning (often from spots nearer the center-court logo than the three-point line) forced Cleveland's defense into grotesque and desperate contortions, per Seth Partnow of Nylon Calculus:
Defensively, the Warriors suddenly resembled the on-a-string unit that led the league last year. Every switch was communicated, every help rotation followed by another, and another, until it was time to pounce.
Even the decisions made by head coach Luke Walton were sharper, as he staggered his rotations to ensure starters stayed on the floor with backups at all times. There would be no points surrendered by five-man bench mobs.
The Warriors stormed into Cleveland with a purpose, ransacked the town and salted the earth on their way out. Whatever hopes the Cavs might have once nurtured about matching up well with the Dubs will never grow now.
And the rest of the league is probably re-evaluating its position on a Warriors team that actually seemed vulnerable last week. The San Antonio Spurs had objectively outplayed them since the beginning of December, and both Cleveland and the Oklahoma City Thunderappeared to have caught up.
The Warriors had something to prove, if only to themselves. And that created real stakes—something no Golden State game has featured for months.
Losses to the Milwaukee Bucks, Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets all came with built-in excuses: long road trips concluding, Curry injured and Green sitting, respectively. That Jan. 16 blowout defeat against the Pistons featured no such rationalizations. The Warriors, coasting and playing far below their potential for weeks, finally just coughed one up against a team that outperformed them.
Hammering the fully healthy Cavs into dust renewed the Dubs' superpower credentials—especially after those same Cavaliers played the Spurs close in San Antonio on Jan. 14.
They don't give out wins for beating the Spurs via the transitive property, though. To truly re-establish themselves as the class of the league, the Warriors will have to take care of that more directly.
They'll get their shot in a week, when they clash with San Antonio on the road in the most highly anticipated game of the season.
Judging by the destruction they wrought in Cleveland, the Warriors will be ready.
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