Warriors beat Cavs in 5 to win 2017 championship
The Golden State Warriors have avenged their 2016 Finals loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, beating the Cavs 129-120 on Monday night to claim the rubber match, and the 2017 championship, with a five-game series win.
The Warriors went 16-1 through the playoffs en route to the title, the best postseason winning percentage in NBA history.
They closed it out with a signature offensive performance. On a night in which Cleveland refused to roll over, responding to every Golden State run with one of its own; in which LeBron James was at his relentless, forceful, bully-balling best; in which Kyrie Irving hit some more impossible layups and J.R. Smith went 7-of-8 from 3-point range; the Warriors, again, simply proved to have too much firepower.
Finals MVP Kevin Durant had a put-away game for the ages, attacking off the catch and blitzing the basket and drilling contested pull-up threes. He poured in 39 points on 14-of-20 shooting, to go along with seven rebounds and five assists. Steph Curry was no less transcendent, dropping 34 points and dishing 10 assists, and triggering countless Cavs defensive breakdowns in the high pick-and-roll. For the most part, Curry either scored when the Cavs played him one-on-one, or whipped passes out of traps to set up four-on-three scoring sequences.
Andre Iguodala was the orchestrator or beneficiary of a ton of those sequences. The 2015 Finals MVP came off the bench to score 20 points, while playing his patented brand of diabolically disruptive defense and posting a game-high plus-18 rating in 38 minutes.
James did everything humanly possible to send the series back to Cleveland for a Game 6 for the second straight year - racking up 41 points, 13 rebounds, eight assists, two steals, and a block, while becoming the first player ever to average a triple-double in the Finals - but the mountain was too steep to climb. He saw no reason to feel bad about the way things ended.
"I left everything I had out on the floor, every single game," James said.
For the Warriors, the win was the fulfillment of a destiny that seemed preordained the moment they signed Durant last July. It's a sort of vindication, after their collapse from 3-1 up in last year's Finals. And it's the culmination of one of the greatest three-year runs the sport has ever seen, with regular-season win totals of 67, 73, and 67 games and now two titles.
If Durant's serious about taking a sub-max contract so the team can keep its core together, that run should extend into the foreseeable future.