Will viewer fatigue ruin Warriors-Cavaliers Part 4?
The only difference this season was that they tricked people into thinking they weren't fated to meet again.
The Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers will meet in the NBA Finals for a fourth straight season. Both teams played too much rope-a-dope and nearly lost in the conference finals, but the marquee squads will battle once again to decide a champion - exactly as everyone expected at the outset of the season.
The league's biggest stars facing one another in The Finals should be a dream matchup, but will viewer fatigue ruin the fourth installment of this lopsided rivalry?
History remembers stars and rivalries
The NBA is remembered in eras defined by great players on great teams making repeated trips to The Finals, and this is no different.
The '80s featured Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers and Larry Bird's Boston Celtics combining for 13 Finals appearances. The NBA was never more popular than when Michael Jordan won six championships in the '90s. That run was followed by Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan winning 10 of the next 14 titles, which ushered in the modern age of basketball and LeBron James' eight straight Finals appearances.
Warriors-Cavaliers IV might be tiring in the moment, but we'll remember this modern era for the way greatness prevailed. The Warriors made The Finals because they married a glitzy style of team basketball with an unparalleled collection of talent for quite possibly the best team ever. The Cavaliers have been willed to a chance at the title by perhaps the greatest player of all time in James, who defies age as he continues to reach new heights. In retrospect, it will look like the stuff of legends.
And for all of the hand-wringing, viewership for the first three iterations has been strong. Those Finals broadcasts drew 11.3 million, 11.4 million, and 11.6 million respectively - the NBA's highest ratings since 2001. The league would be thrilled to continue that streak.
We've seen this before
The problem isn't necessarily repeating the matchup - the problem is the totally predictable result.
Golden State opened as a 12-point favorite in Game 1, and was given 1-10 odds to win its third title in four years. The Warriors didn't exactly look convincing against the Rockets in the conference finals, but they're now up against the worst Cavaliers team since 2015.
Warriors owner Joe Lacob - who once proclaimed his team was "light-years ahead" - even admitted to Anthony Slater of The Athletic that he was "tired of Cleveland" after surviving Game 7 against the Rockets. The Warriors are almost guaranteed to win, and yet Lacob wanted a new challenge.
It took a miraculous confluence of circumstances for the Cavaliers to erase a 3-1 deficit in 2016. Outside of that, the Warriors have simply been overwhelming. The 2015 Finals only lasted six games because the Warriors had yet to stumble upon their unparalleled "Death Lineup" look (although the Cavaliers were undercut by injuries), while the 2017 edition would have been a sweep if the Cavaliers hadn't broken a playoff record with 24 threes in Game 4.
The gap has only widened since the Cavaliers turned Kyrie Irving into Lakers castoffs Larry Nance Jr. and Jordan Clarkson. James is better than ever, but even the shorthanded Celtics and the overmatched Pacers took three games out of him. Golden State should make short work of the King yet again, and there just isn't the same appetite for a third beatdown.