CLEVELAND — Flags fly forever. They also alter the lens.
The Golden State Warriors are back in town, and by now that champagne smell is most certainly gone from the visiting locker room (sorry Steph), scrubbed away in the bitterness of the Warriors’ 3-1 Finals collapse — or the euphoria of the Cavaliers’ historic comeback. Again, it’s a matter of choosing through which lens it’s viewed.
What’s clear by now, however, is that the Cavs spent all of last season chasing the ghost of the Warriors. Now they’re greeting the first of two clashes this season with a little more than a belch and belly scratch.
“Everyone gets so crazy with the penmanship and the coverage of a Christmas Day game, and then the next day you’ve got to play again and it’s over,” LeBron James said. “I get excited for the game, but I don’t really care too much about storylines on Christmas. It’s not a big thing for me.”
That certainly is drastically different from last year, when the beginning of David Blatt’s demise occurred at Oracle Arena on Christmas Day. Players essentially blamed Blatt and his erratic rotations for the loss and took their protest public the next day with a pitiful showing at Portland. Within weeks, Blatt was gone.
All of that, of course, was BC: Before Championship. The bling from rings has a way of altering urgency. No longer do the Cavs have to measure themselves against the Warriors and San Antonio Spurs during regular-season games. They could lose by double figures Sunday — and they might — and no one will set the building on fire and go running out of it. Not after last year, not after cutting the head off the giant in their own home.
There is a peaceful swagger to this team, an assurance that everything will be all right even when it’s not. No backup point guard? The starting shooting guard is lost for essentially the rest of the regular season? No big deal. Tyronn Lue keeps telling his general manager to take his time, that they’ve got this.
The Cavs aren’t ready to tangle with the Warriors for a seven-game series right now, James said so himself Friday night after curb stomping the Brooklyn Nets. Smith is out for at least three months. They need another wing and a point guard. Another big man would be nice, too.
They are the defending champions, but there are still holes. Yet general manager David Griffin isn’t pushing the cart through the clearance aisles on Christmas Eve looking for whatever broken wing he can wrap and put under Lue’s tree. It’s that peaceful swagger, that championship cache.
James mentioned the Cavs, Warriors and Spurs as three teams that are nearly impossible to scheme against in 24 hours. They’re too balanced, too good, too smart and too successful. The Warriors have a roster full of players who can dribble, pass and shoot. The Cavs have a couple of guys who can do that in James and Kyrie Irving, and a bunch of others who are really good at shooting once someone else can get the ball to them.
“You get one day to game plan for those guys or one day to game plan for the Spurs? It’s just too hard,” James said. “You need a week to game plan for that and that’s what you get when you’re able to play in a series vs. teams like that. But we’ll be as prepared as we can be for a regular season game on Sunday.”
What the world learned last season is how little the regular season means to playoff success. The Warriors swept the season series from the Cavs last season, including a blistering, embarrassing loss at Quicken Loans Arena. So what? That didn’t help the Warriors in June. Regardless of the outcome Sunday or in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day rematch next month, those results will have zero impact in determining June’s champion.
“For ratings, it’s great. Put as much as you want into it,” Channing Frye said. “For players, it’s one game.”
Richard Jefferson, sitting at his locker a few feet away, heard Frye’s response and interjected.
“We won’t see them for six months,” he said.