King Kaufman's Sports Daily
LeBron goes off for 48. Yeah, that's the smart basketball play. Cavs take 3-2 lead. Plus: Steve Kerr, G.M.
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June 1, 2007 | What is there to say about LeBron James' performance in Game 5 of the NBA Eastern Conference finals Thursday night? Other than, for some of us -- a lot of us, actually -- I told you so.
Thursday night's game, a 109-107 double-overtime victory by the Cleveland LeBronJameses, er, Cavaliers over the Detroit Pistons, was the answer to all that nonsense LeBron himself spewed after his ill-advised dish at the end of Game 1. He said then that passing to Donyell Marshall for a 3-pointer was the smart basketball play. Marshall missed the shot and the Pistons won the game.
No. The smart basketball play is to give the ball to the best player on the floor and get the hell out of the way. That's what Charles Barkley and Magic Johnson and I were saying last week, and James was smart to finally listen to Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson and me. After all, the three of us combined to score 41,464 points in the NBA.
In Game 5, a road victory that gave the Cavs a 3-2 series lead, James drove to the basket for dunk after dunk. The Pistons, one of the best defensive teams in the league, a team that's a championship contender every year because of its defense, were helpless.
James scored 48 points. The amazing thing is that his teammates actually scored 61. I can't remember a single one of them. I can't imagine why he let them try.
Toward the end, he didn't. James scored Cleveland's last 25 points. He scored 29 of the Cavs' last 30. I just made a joke about Barkley, Magic and me combining for all those points in the NBA -- see, the joke is that Barkley and Magic really scored all of them -- but this isn't really a joke: I could have logged some minutes for the Cavs last night and they still would have scored 109.
They'd have given up more than 107, but we're not talking about that right now, are we? Good.
It's hard to imagine the Pistons won't come up with some way to get the ball out of James' hands or stop him from driving at will in Game 6, which is scheduled for Saturday night in Cleveland. Then again, it was hard to imagine they wouldn't figure it out in the 58 minutes allotted to them Thursday night in Detroit and they didn't.
Next page: Losing McDyess may have cost the Pistons that one crucial point. Plus: Steve Kerr, G.M.