Three memories of a magnificent 7: Cavaliers-Warriors epic 2016 NBA Finals finale

New York Times

5 hours ago

By David Aldridge, Marcus Thompson II and Joe Vardon
On Sunday night, the Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder will play in the 20th Game 7 in NBA Finals history.
Of the previous 19, the last Game 7 in 2016 between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors had countless subplots, numerous memorable moments and one stunning outcome.
Three writers for The Athletic were there on that fateful night, a night that paused a dynasty, burnished a legend and changed the course of the NBA.
Marcus Thompson II, now a lead columnist for The Athletic, was a Bay Area News sports columnist when the Warriors and Cavs met in Game 7.
The Warriors didn't lose. Not that year. They'd drop a game here and there. But when it mattered, when they absolutely had to have it, they got the W. This was their calling.
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They were known for their 73 wins. For blitzing through the league. But that season got increasingly arduous for Golden State. Pursuing history is an exhaustive endeavor.
They chased the NBA single-season wins record and ran into a youthful buzz saw in the form of Boston and Minnesota down the stretch. So much so, it looked as if the record was off the table. But they got it.
They lost Steph Curry for most of the first round. The season was hijacked by his MCL sprain. But they advanced.
He was forced back into action when the Blazers won Game 3 in the second round, threatening to make a series of it. Curry returned in the most epic fashion: a record 17 points in overtime, a 40-spot in Portland. The Warriors moved on.
Golden State lost Game 1 at home in the West Finals. Then got blasted in Games 3 and 4 in Oklahoma City. It seemed as if they'd met their match. The weight of expectation, the fatigue, the pressure, finally seemed to catch up to them. They trailed 3-1 to Kevin Durant, an MVP, and the loaded Thunder. Somehow, the Warriors won the series.
So when they got to the waning moments of Game 7, the expectation of their success warred against the obvious. Their beautiful game had been reduced to a brutal grind. Their demeanor marred with fatigue. Their starting center knocked out with injury. Their starting point guard hurting. Their resolve wilting against a LeBron James-led revolt against the odds. Still, against reason, the Warriors were going to win. Because that's what they did. Always.
This was the pervasive thinking as Kyrie Irving got the switch into Curry and side-stepped into a 3 from the right wing. It wasn't until it splashed with 53 seconds remaining — breaking a three-minute, 46-second scoring drought fueled by perhaps the most intense display of competitive resolve from two teams in Finals history — that the aura of Warriors inevitability cracked wide open.
They could really lose.
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Then Curry, rattled by the monumental reverb of Kyrie's shot, hurried into a stubborn approach on the ensuing possession, missed a desperate 3 over Kevin Love, who used his length and a rare display of defensive intensity to deny Curry a good look. LeBron grabbed the rebound and the whole arena changed. The scene inside Oracle Arena suddenly had a new hue, a surreal sensation. The filter of history colored the moment.
What felt unthinkable was happening. The unbeatable Warriors would finally succumb.
One thing I'll never forget happened shortly after the final horn. The Warriors immediately left the court. Stunned. Angered. Exhausted. They retreated to the locker room as the black jerseys of Cleveland celebrated on the hallowed hardwood of Oracle. Moments later, however, Steph Curry gradually made his way back to the court. So did Draymond Green. And Andre Iguodala. They stood by the Warriors' bench and watched the Cavaliers dance on their soul. They were waiting for LeBron and Cleveland to have their moment, soaking in the torment, until the visitors were ready.
Then they walked over and hugged the foes with whom they just made history. Because even in their heartbreak, they understood what was unmistakable inside that arena. One of the greatest moments in NBA history just went down. No one would ever forget this game, this series, this season. And even though they lost, epically, they were obligated to lose like winners.
— Marcus Thompson II
Joe Vardon, a senior NBA writer at The Athletic, covered the game for Cleveland.com that night. He was also host for The Athletic's 'A King's Reign' podcast series. This is excerpted from that series.
The tour buses sat idling in the stillness of that Sunday night, in an emptying parking lot shared by the Golden State Warriors' Oracle Arena and the Oakland A's Alameda Coliseum.
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'NBA Media Shuttle,' on placards in the front window of the two buses, let us know we were in the right place.
As we climbed aboard for a ride back across the Bay Bridge, our hair smelled of cigar smoke and our skin was sticky from champagne. We weren't the ones celebrating — but we were in the room when the Cleveland Cavaliers started their party. It seemed to last for years.
On June 19, 2016, the Cavs won Game 7 of the NBA Finals, 93-89, to capture their first championship and the first for any major pro team in Cleveland since the Browns won an NFL title in 1964 (before there was such a thing as the Super Bowl). The Cavs were also the first team in NBA history to win a finals after trailing 3-1.
At the center of this historic moment was of course, LeBron James, the finals MVP, the kid from Akron, about 40 miles south of Cleveland, who fulfilled his promise to bring a title to the region of his birth. He produced a triple-double in that last game (27 points, 11 rebounds, 11 assists), and delivered what is most likely the most clutch defensive play in NBA history — chasing down Andre Iguodala for a block to preserve an 89-89 tie with about 1:50 left.
No one does — or should — feel bad for those of us who were there that night in Oakland to cover Game 7. But I can attest it was… stressful.
There was a walkway behind the best media seating, about halfway up the lower bowl in the arena, and during the timeout following the block, I remember getting out of my chair and walking from one end to the other, just to relieve the tension.
When Kyrie Irving drained that stepback 3 to break the tie, I'll never forget the collective gasp from the scribes around me, or the stunned Warrior fans in front of us who had heckled the Cleveland-based writers not just all night, but all series.
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I remember LeBron trying to put perhaps the greatest exclamation point on a Game 7 triumph with a facial dunk, bricking that dunk as he got fouled, watching him flopping and writhing in pain on the court, holding his wrist, and then, of course, getting up and making one of two free throws.
And then I remember seeing the clock tick under five seconds, the Warriors miss another 3, and realizing they were out of time, it was over, the Cavs were champions. My hands trembled briefly as I tried to type.
The next two hours were a blur, from writing the game story on deadline, to fighting our way into the Cavs' locker room for the champagne celebration, to wading back toward the interview room, to (for me) catching majority owner Dan Gilbert in one hallway for an interview, to spending a brief moment with LeBron as he walked from one international TV interview to the next, carrying the Larry O'Brien trophy.
What awaited us on the other side of the bridge that night, back at the media hotel, the Marriott Marquis, would be a long night of writing and wine drinking — putting the finishing touches on our deep dives and analyses of an American sports story for the ages, while sipping the wine and eating the prime rib the NBA put out in the media hospitality suite.
But as we filed onto the buses, and the lights inside were out, just the hum of the idling engine could be heard. When the man driving our bus released the parking brake and shifted into gear, and the bus rolled toward the highway, I looked for U2's 'A Beautiful Day' on my phone, found it, and pressed play. I wasn't wearing headphones – so either the whole bus heard it, or at least the people sitting in the last several rows, near me.
It was beautiful — not a cloud in the sky that afternoon before Game 7. The game was unforgettable. For those of us who were from northeast Ohio, maybe even Akron, there of course was a streak of sentimentality to have been there for LeBron's crowning achievement, and for someone, literally anyone, to break the decades-long curse of Cleveland's sports teams.
But if you were there, for work, and not from Ohio, with no nativist connection to LeBron or to the team, the bus ride across the bridge was still a necessary moment of reflection for what you'd just witnessed.
— Joe Vardon
David Aldridge is a senior columnist for The Athletic. For 2016's Game 7, Aldridge covered the contest for NBA.com and Turner Sports.
The undercurrents of the 2016 finals flowed below the surface of Warriors-Cavs like an Atlantic riptide. They crashed over the shoals in Game 7.
There was LeBron James, a kid from Akron raised by a single mother, whose family bounced from place to place as he grew up, achingly poor, not knowing where they'd call home in a few weeks or months. Needing assistance, public and private, to find any beachhead on which they could hold onto a dream of future stability.
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And there was Stephen Curry, who grew up in a comfortable two-parent household, with a mother who was a three-sport athlete in high school and a volleyball player in college, and whose father starred in the NBA in the 1990s, as one of the best shooters of his era. Of course, Stephen and his brother Seth had challenges growing up. But nothing approaching the searing ones James faced.
Yet both James and Curry – who were, incredibly, born in the same hospital in Akron – became two of the greatest players in NBA history. Each led his teams to multiple championships. Each established himself as a fierce competitor and leader. The two of them were noble successors to Kobe Bryant as the faces of the league, and the TV ratings and attention each garnered were the best thing the NBA had going for it for almost a decade.
So when they started regularly meeting in the finals, there was not just a championship on the line. There was an unspoken gauntlet laid down: Who's running this s— in the NBA? Me or you?
Sure, James had famously gone to watch Curry while the latter started to become a star in college. But this was the pros. The big show. Alpha-Alpha stuff.
The competition/animosity was real, even though Curry didn't bear any public ill will toward James, he nonetheless wanted to knock his head off when they squared off. And James, of course, didn't share any bonhomie toward Curry.
'I got a text today from someone in Chicago who said, 'The whole city of Chicago is pulling for 'Bron,'' James' agent, Rich Paul, said the night of Game 7. 'And that has nothing to do with the Bulls. But it has everything to do with where we come from.'
The 73-9 Warriors were well on their way to becoming the greatest single-season team of all time when Draymond Green, inexplicably, elbowed James in the groin in the last minutes of a 108-97 win in Game 4, which put Golden State up 3-1. Green was called for a flagrant foul, triggering an automatic one-game suspension for accumulated flagrant points during the playoffs.
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That was the opening James needed.
Cleveland came roaring back, beating the Warriors in Game 5 in Oakland, and routing them in Game 6 in Cleveland — a game punctuated by James blocking Curry's layup out of bounds in the waning minutes, and then snarling at him afterward. Hell yeah, it was personal.
So Game 7, back in the Bay, had a lot more than a championship on the line. And James responded, with a triple-double and another iconic block, his chasedown of Iguodala in the last two minutes. The Cavaliers became the first team in NBA history to come back from a 3-1 deficit to win the championship. James delivered the title that Cleveland fans had been waiting 52 years to celebrate. He got his get-back from losing to the Warriors in the finals the year before. And he beat Stephen Curry to do it.
'He's the best player on his team every time they get (to the finals),' the Cavaliers' general manager David Griffin said. 'It's amazing how willing he is to sacrifice anything to win.'
Triple revenge, served ice cold.
'People in Northeast Ohio, it's really like you have to work for everything you have,' Paul said. 'And there's no Fifth Avenue. There's no beach. It's a grind, grind, grind city. And a lot of people wake up with the mindset of, I can't. People wake up saying, 'I can't.' So if you're eating 'I can't' for breakfast, how can you be successful?'
In the intervening years, as they aged and understood they had a lot more in common than what separated them, James and Curry have come to like each other very much, the same way that Magic Johnson and Larry Bird came to a place of respect and mutual admiration as their careers came toward the end. James pushed for Curry to be on the 2024 Olympic team; what developed in France was a 'total bromance' between the two former adversaries.
'We are not enemies, but friends,' Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address. 'We must not be enemies.'
— David Aldridge