MVN - Most Valuable Network

Bruised Up…and Going to Game 7

Again, the team that won the rebounding battle won Game 6.

We’ve pointed to perimeter shooting and limiting turnovers as two of the biggest keys in this series, but truth be told, the team that has lost the turnover battle is still 2-4 in this series. And neither team is shooting well from beyond the arc since Game 5.

But this series is about everything we thought it would be about the minute the matchup became official: defense and rebounding. The Cavs won the battle on the boards on Friday night, 45-37, while holding a 16-7 edge on the o-boards. Zydrunas Ilgauskas has been one of the best offensive rebounders in the league over the past several years, and five of his 10 rebounds came on the offensive side.

The result: a 17-2 edge in the Cavs’ favor in second-chance points, easily the decisive stat of Game 6 that summarized Friday night in a nutshell.

It took a while, but it looks like somebody has finally found LeBron James and returned him back to the Cavaliers. LB played like a superstar in Game 6 and carried the Cavs on his back, showing no signs of the errant shooting that maligned him during the first part of this series. It may seem unorthodox, but this is the way this Cavs team is built: play tough-as-nails defense, rebound well, go after every loose ball, and let LeBron do his thing on offense. And Game 6 followed that formula to a tee.

In a perfect world, LeBron would come out of the locker room on Sunday afternoon at the Garden in Boston and have a game similar to the one in Game 5 at the Palace last year. You know - 48 points, the team’s last 25 points, 29 of their last 30, and scoring all 18 points in two overtime sessions as the fans in the opposing building sat around awestruck and heartbroken, not realizing that they had just become witnesses. Heck, how about LeBron dropping a double-nickel 55 on the C’s in their own house in Game 7?

The possibilities for LeBron’s legacy are endless as a result of this slugfest of a series. But that’s the thing: this series is a slugfest. We don’t need to see LeBron try to put on a one-man show to win Game 7. We don’t need to see LB try to take on the Celtics by himself.

We want a game like the one on Friday night: a return to the brilliant all-around display combined with exceptional, second-to-absolutely-no-one leadership. Those 12 boards were far more important than those 32 points (we just talked about the rebounding winner being 6-0 in this series, right?). Those six assists? Could have been more since it seemed like everybody around him had stone hands or couldn’t handle his howitzer passes.

Here’s the good news for those of you who want this team to win Game 7 by seeing LeBron put up another epic: LB has had his two best games of this series in Games 5 and 6. Easily. James was 20-for-78 (25.6 percent) from the field in the first four games. In Games 5 and 6, LeBron is shooting 21-for-48, a sparkling 43.8 percent considering those first four games and the type of this series this has been.

Another noteworthy change in Game 6: LeBron actually got better in the second half, scoring 19 of his 32 points after recess. In Game 5, LeBron only scored 12 of his 35 points in the third and fourth quarters while shooting four-for-11 from the field.

Following Game 1, former MVN NBA columnist and current CelticsBlog member Steve Weinman and I did a Q&A on this series. When the topic of LeBron’s dismal Game 1 performance (and impending dismal Game 2 performance) came up, I told Steve the following:

Over the course of a long seven-game series, LeBron James will figure it out eventually. It might take him a game. It might take him two. But eventually, he’ll know everything a team can throw at him and know exactly how to make adjustments to counter that.

And nothing the opposition can do from that point onwards can stop him.

It took five games, but LeBron has definitely seemed to figure out the Celtics and their top-ranked defense. We’ll find out on Sunday if something can, indeed, stop him.

If not, we just might be in for one of the most memorable individual performances in NBA history.

That charge called on Paul Pierce with a minute left? It didn’t look like LeBron had his feet set, and although I’m not sure, I think I saw Anderson Varejao blushing with pride during the dead ball. Heck of a sell by LB.

You know what, Boston? Tough. Cleveland fans have been on the business end of those kinds of calls for decades now, so don’t look here for sympathy. The only thing you’re going to here from this end is, “GOOD CALL, BABY! GOOD CALL!”

Ray Allen still sucks. What a pompous asshole. I have to stop myself from taking out my aggression on a nearby wall whenever I see that smug, arrogant look on his face. This guy definitely thinks he’s all that, but not many people can say that they’re overrated, ringless chokers and bad actors. Three-for-eight from the floor in Game 6, 0-for-three from three-point range, and nine points in 42 minutes too many.

They call it the “Big 3″ in Boston? With a guy who is shooting below 35 percent in this series and averaging all of 10 points? A guy who is making $16 million this season and is the 18th-highest paid player in the league? Just 35 percent and 10 points a game?

And to think that a lot of us wanted this overpaid, overpriced, overrated, washed-up, self-absorbed jerked when he was a free agent in 2005. There’s a reason these guys haven’t even been to the Finals, let alone win a championship in their careers.

The Celtics shot four-for-16 from three-point range. With all the talk during the opening stages of this series being about LeBron’s poor shooting, how about the god-awful three-point shooting of the Boston Celtics? The Celtics are now a horrific 24-for-89 from downtown in this series, a scorching 27 percent. The Cavs were the best team at defending the three-point line last year, when they went 50-32 and made that Finals run.

This year, it was the C’s who were the best at defending the arc while the Cavs fell to 12th in the league in that department, but you wouldn’t know the difference if this series is the only time you’ve watched these two teams play. The Cavs haven’t exactly been the pre-Shaq Phoenix Suns when it comes to stretching the floor, but their shooters have come up big in certain spot situations in this series.

Boston, however, hasn’t been able to put up solid perimeter shooting at all during this series. The lone exception may have been Rajon Rondo making the Cavs pay for leaving him wide open time and time again in Game 5, but even Rondo scored all of just two points on one-for-four shooting without even attempting a three-pointer in 30 minutes on Friday.

And Carlos Boozer’s season is over. Nothing makes like a great Cavalier night than watching LeBron force a Game 7 in Boston and Boozer falling flat on his ugly acne-infested face at home in Game 6. Nothing against the Utah Jazz franchise, but first they watched Jordan torment them, now they’re seeing Kobe torture them, and if they can ever get to the NBA Finals to face the Eastern Conference winner some day in the future…they might run into the other #23.

Sucks to be Utah. Boozer deserves it. The Cavs will be playing Sunday while Boozer will be watching and applying his Benzaclin all day. He’s lucky: anyone who stabs a benevolent blind guy in the back when he’s trying to help them out deserves far, far worse. Losing Game 6, fouling out, and being booed off the court by a band of Mormons isn’t nearly enough work being done by karma.

But the Cavs will certainly have their work cut out for them Sunday afternoon at 3:30 pm Eastern on ABC.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Shaquille O'Neal, Steve Weinman, Carlos Boozer, Anderson Varejao, Rajon Rondo, Michael Jordan, Ray Allen, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Utah Jazz, Cleveland Cavaliers, Phoenix Suns, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Boston Celtics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.