Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press The last NBA Finals game played at Quicken Loans Arena ended with a Cleveland Cavaliers victory over the Golden State Warriors to counter a sweep. We're headed for a less dire circumstance Wednesday, but the Eastern Conference champions must win Game 3 for a legitimate chance to come out on top in this series. During the Eastern Conference Finals, the Cavaliers fell behind 0-2 to the Boston Celtics and regained momentum in Cleveland. So, there's still hope within the fanbase. Nonetheless, Cleveland goes up against the NBA's best team, and there's still a lingering sting from guard JR Smith's Game 1 gaffe that's been replayed a thousand times over. Will the Cavaliers swing the momentum in their favor, or do the Warriors show a killer instinct to push their opponent to the brink of elimination? Where: Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland Video Play Button Videos you might like When: Wednesday, June 6, at 9 p.m. ET Watch: ABC Live Stream: WatchESPN Prediction Despite the Warriors flexing their muscles in the fourth quarter of Game 2, it's a team that's still vulnerable, especially on the road. Golden State dropped contests to the San Antonio Spurs, without guard Stephen Curry, and the New Orleans Pelicans with him on the court. We also saw the defending champions almost lose the NBA Finals opener at home. Of course, LeBron James will need to score within the 40-50-point range to give the Cavaliers a chance. Furthermore, his teammates will need to knock down their open shots and continue to win on the boards. Cleveland outrebounded Golden State in both games, 35-11 on the offensive glass. According to Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated, head coach Tyronn Lue plans to utilize southpaw shooter Rodney Hood in the rotation: During the regular season, Hood shot 44 percent from the field and 35 percent behind the three-point line. Despite averaging just 13.8 minutes per contest in 15 postseason games, the Cavaliers need an offensive spark with Smith shooting 5-of-19 overall and Jordan Clarkson providing minimal impact off the bench. The Warriors may welcome forward Andre Iguodala back to the court after he missed six games because of a knee injury. He participated in a full practice Tuesday, per The Athletic's Anthony Slater: The 14th-year veteran would boost Golden State's defense even if he's less than 100 percent, which doesn't bode well for a Cavaliers team that shot below 45 percent from the field in both outings. In comparison, the Warriors have converted 51 percent or better in the last two games. As high-energy contributors, Tristan Thompson and Larry Nance Jr. will feed off the home crowd and reach near double-double figures. Lue talked about using a physical approach with the Warriors shooters, which may lead to a rough performance for Curry, who's been lights out over the past two outings: The Warriors have struggled through stretches on the road with all their stars on the court during the playoffs. In a game the Cavaliers must win, they'll add some intrigue to the series with a victory. Prediction: Cavaliers 117, Warriors 113<doc-sep>The Warriors entered this year's Finals the heaviest of favorites against the Cavaliers. With a 2-0 lead in hand, would a Golden State sweep indicate a Cleveland mental breakdown or just the reality of the Dubs' dominance? After a devastating Game 1 defeat, the Cavaliers were overwhelmed by the Warriors' stars in a Game 2 blowout. As the series shifts back to Cleveland, the biggest question on everyone's mind is: Will the Warriors pull off the sweep? In the latest episode of the Open Floor podcast, Andrew Sharp and Ben Golliver check in from Cleveland to discuss the Warriors' first two wins and how the Cavaliers might respond in Games 3 and 4. Will LeBron James be able to carry his teammates to victory? Or will his supporting cast step up to lessen the load and catch the Warriors off guard? With Game 3 tipping off Wednesday night, Sharp and Golliver examine what the Cavs will have to do to stave off the sweep. Subscribe to Open Floor on Apple Podcasts to check out the full episode and more. (This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity). Getty Images Andrew Sharp: If the Warriors sweep, is it a mental breakdown on the Cavs' side or was it always on the table? All along, we said getting a game off the Warriors was probably the best LeBron could do. What do you see happening from here? Ben Golliver: It reminds me of the last couple of years. Same situation, down 2–0 coming back to Cleveland. It’s kind of that make-or-break Game 3. If you come out and throw a big punch and everyone is hitting their three-point shots, the role players step up, Rodney Hood has his game, Kyle Korver finally gets loose, Golden State can’t quite match the urgency of Cleveland and LeBron has a 40-point triple-double…then OK. This is going to be something we’re going to talk about. If it’s going to be like last year and they just can’t quite summon that level of energy, then this is going to end pretty quickly. So to me, we’re going to know one way or the other pretty soon… I’m leaning toward it’s probably not going to matter. I think the big takeaway from Game 2 was that Steph Curry and Kevin Durant finally struck the proper balance in terms of their roles offensively. I think the heavy switching in the Western Conference finals threw Golden State for some real loops. And I think what we saw in Game 2 was KD making really aggressive quick decisions, not overpassing, passing when he needed to, and then attacking off the dribble to get to the basket or get easy eight-foot shots instead of 18-foot shots. That constant pummeling set up Steph Curry. He was slumping a bit in the first three quarters, but that set him up perfectly for the haymakers that he was throwing in the fourth. Cleveland, they really had no answer for Curry, because they couldn’t divert attention away from Durant, because he was basically scoring every time he touched the ball. But once Curry gets going, they can’t divert extra attention to him, because he just makes that slip pass to Durant for a back-breaking dunk midway through the fourth quarter. It was finally the proper interplay between Durant and Curry that had really been lacking for the last month or so. When those guys are clicking, I don’t know how you stop them. And I certainly don’t know how Cleveland’s defensive personnel stops them. Leaning on LeBron: Can the King Carry the Cavs Again in Game 3? Sharp: Yeah, I agree with everything you said. You took a bit of a passive-aggressive shot at Steph struggling for the first three quarters… Golliver: Well, he was… Sharp: I’m not sure I’d agree with that whatsoever. I think he was doing a great job setting the tempo and getting everyone else involved. Golliver: But he was like 6 for 18. We can’t say that was a good shooting performance from Steph in the first three quarters. Sharp: But if you’re going to be reductive and say Steph’s shooting is exactly how we feel about his game, then sure, he wasn’t great. Golliver: I just said he struggled with his shot, that’s all. He wasn’t really initiating most of the offense earlier in the game. They were playing through KD. But the point was, when he was ready to get going, the board was set up for him perfectly and he knocked them out. Five straight threes in the fourth, one being a four-point play… it was pow-pow-pow. It doesn’t take 48 minutes from Steph to do that. All I’m saying is it came in an eight-minute flurry and that was that. Sharp: I just enjoy how quietly defensive you are getting… Golliver: Oh, come on! Sharp: This has been a trying few weeks for your boy Durant and I understand. I’ll give you space, just like Ty Lue. I’ll let you work through it. Golliver: What am I supposedly working through? The fact that KD was better than Steph in Game 2? Sharp: [Laughs] In all seriousness, what I liked about that Warriors win was that we got to see them at their very best. Everyone was hitting on all cylinders. And really, that’s one of the games that I wanted coming out of this series. Because the Warriors can screw around and win four games and a title, but we saw them get pushed enough to show why they are going to win three titles in four years here. They did a lot of little things defensively to make LeBron’s life tougher and there were guys like Shaun Livingston and Klay Thompson, who showed up and played hurt and got 20 points—everyone was great. Draymond was great, even though he’s not shooting anymore. That’s kind of the Warriors’ formula. A team that is really smart and does all the little things, and then you have Steph come in with the backbreaking threes. It was the ideal Warriors win in Game 2. And I’m glad we got a chance to see it. And I should add: Cleveland deserves credit for forcing Golden State to play that game. Going into Game 2, I had my guard up for just a terrible Cavs effort. After Game 1 and the way that ended, I really was nervous that they were going to be totally checked out and Golden State went up 9-10 points early on, but Cleveland kept fighting back and chip into that lead. And it forced the Warriors to play a solid 48-minute game. I was impressed with both teams in Game 2. Golliver: Yeah, LeBron was having to work a lot harder in Game 2 but still generating a lot of offense for both himself and Kevin Love. If you’re trying to sell help to Cleveland, that’s where it starts. Golden State doesn’t really have LeBron figured out here. Now, Andre Iguodala coming back could help, but they don’t have some master plan. Like having KD or Draymond pick him up around midcourt and try and wear him down possession after possession is a really good strategy, but it’s not like the LeBron Rules. They haven’t found some way to neutralize him, he’s still getting basically anywhere he wants on the court and getting some quality three-point looks for his teammates, who were just not hitting them in Game 2. I thought, given how slow Steph started, that could have really been a game had the Cavs’ guys showed up. I wasn’t surprised to see it kind of crumble in the fourth because I just didn’t think Cleveland had enough offensive continuity to keep pace once Steph got going. Sharp: And that’s part of what makes the Shaun Livingston, two-seconds-on-the-shot-clock, 16-foot jumper so painful. Knowing the Steph run is coming makes all the other little things more demoralizing. Golliver: Or that David West corner three? His first three-pointer since November? That was a crusher, too. Draymond Before Draymond: The Complicated Legacy of Dennis Rodman Sharp: Exactly.<doc-sep>In Game 2 of their second-round series, the Utah Jazz punctured the Houston Rockets' switch-everything defense with the most tried-and-true switching antidote: slipping screens. A Utah player -- usually Rudy Gobert -- would sidle over to screen for Donovan Mitchell, only to stop short and dart to the rim. Gobert was gone before the two Houston defenders could properly swap assignments. In Game 3, Houston was ready. The Rockets reminded themselves they would not switch until the guy guarding Mitchell actually felt Gobert's pick. Trevor Ariza, defending Mitchell, waited for Gobert to hit him, and then burrowed underneath the French Rejection -- staying between Gobert and the rim. Ariza and Clint Capela switched only at the moment they could touch Gobert at the same time: NBA For the Rockets, this was not an adjustment. It was a return to principles they drilled all season with an eye on the Warriors. They had developed habits, and those habits carried them within one win -- and who knows, maybe one hamstring pull -- of the NBA Finals. The Cleveland Cavaliers have few habits, unless you count lazing through the regular season and fatuous melodrama. They are trying to develop habits on the fly against an opponent that demands something barely short of perfection -- an opponent against which "switch everything" is only step one of a feasible game plan. Like a student cramming for finals after skipping class the entire semester, the Cavs cobbled a brand new blueprint just for these Finals.. It was sensible -- something you could see coming. Boiled down, it went: • Switch everything off the ball -- a Houston impression. On top of (theoretically) short-circuiting Golden State's fancy stuff, this would spare LeBron the exhausting full-time duty of chasing Kevin Durant; LeBron could pass him off to the next defender, and Cleveland would live with Durant going one-on-one against that guy. • Switch all on-ball exchanges except any Stephen Curry pick-and-roll involving Kevin Love. Cleveland has long preferred having Love trap to force the ball out of Curry's hands. That leaves Cleveland three-on-four behind the play, but it mitigates the risk by ignoring Golden State's worst shooters. The new plan meshed habits old and new. It amounted to playing two schemes at once. It was perhaps the best combination of ideas available on short notice. It was also entirely predictable that a team with such a weak defensive infrastructure would fail when suddenly confronted with multiple sets of rules. Information overload can paralyze even elite defenses. Failure came, repeatedly, in the first quarter of Game 1. When Curry targeted Love, the Cavs collapsed in a haze of confusion: Are we switching? Wait, I thought we were trapping? Oh god, they scored already. They aborted. They would just switch everything, and hope for the best. Whatever old habits they had for defending Golden State -- those traps -- were scrapped. You could understand the idea. Love running Curry off the arc alone is not so different than trapping Curry; both gambits grant Golden State a 4-on-3 in exchange for (in theory) shutting off Curry triples. On some possessions, it worked. But over time, Golden State will win this battle because of both its historic talent, and Cleveland's long-engrained defensive shortcomings. Houston had a basic rule for defending Curry, says Jeff Bzdelik, the architect of their switchy defense: When Capela switched onto Curry, no one was allowed to help from anywhere -- even if Curry slithered inside Capela off the bounce. Houston had confidence Capela could bother Curry from behind. They would live with Curry hitting contested layups because 3s would surely kill them. Love, of course, isn't Capela. Neither is Larry Nance Jr. When Curry beats Love off the bounce, those layups become uncontested -- almost 90 percent shots. Both Love and Nance have occasionally fallen for Curry jukes, stumbled below the 3-point arc, and surrendered open step-back 3s. On one Game 2 possession, Love played Curry correctly -- jumping to his side, well above the arc -- but yielded too much airspace: NBA Both decelerated for a fatal half-second when Curry gave up the ball, exhaling like a horror-movie victim who thinks the villain didn't see her slip into that closet, giving Curry the teensy advantage he needs to launch one of those patented give-and-go triples. And that's the unseen danger of a switch-everything scheme: It cannot handle any breakdown at the point of attack. It's easy to look at that and scream: Where is the help? The Warriors have both JaVale McGee and Draymond Green on the floor! How does no one meet Durant at the rim? Well, Love is guarding McGee, and even if he decides to, like, move, he's probably not disrupting Durant. (Still: Moving is helpful!) But what about Tristan Thompson? NBA He's focused on Klay Thompson popping off a flare screen from Draymond Green. Why? Because in a switch-everything scheme, it is his job to switch onto Klay Thompson. Switching in that sense works against traditional help defense. This is not a novel problem for defenses dealing with the Warriors. Help off their non-shooters, and those guys pivot into screens for literally three of the greatest shooters in the history of Earth. Stick to them, and you concede the rim. "It's like you're in a boat with three holes in the bottom," Bzdelik says of defending Golden State, "and you only have two pegs to plug them. You just have to keep moving the pegs around." The Rockets understood switching alone wouldn't be enough. They practiced how and when to help off Golden State's non-shooters, Bzdelik says. They had rules for specific situations -- baseline drives when the best shooter is in one particular corner, penetration down the middle, and more. Cleveland is improvising with lesser talent. Sometimes, the Cavaliers pull it off; watch Kyle Korver spot LeBron sagging off Draymond Green, and realize he has to chase Klay Thompson around Green's screen instead of assuming LeBron will switch. All these challenges coalesced on the first possession of Game 2, when McGee slipped a pick for Curry, and jaunted untouched to the rim. J.R. Smith, committing treason so far, was late digesting the slip, and too far behind McGee to do much of anything: NBA Tristan Thompson again has his back turned to the play, obsessed with his job of switching onto Klay Thompson. As for Smith's gaffe there, the Cavs looked unprepared for the ferocity and timing of Golden State's slip cuts. That is less a pick than two humans crossing on opposite sides of a sidewalk; Livingston and Curry barely come within 10 feet of each other. With that much distance between "screeners," the Cavs should just stay with their original assignments. This is how Houston briefly neutered Golden State's attack. The Rockets didn't switch everything. They switched almost everything. The Cavs are aware this is a good idea; watch Love and Jeff Green agree in the moment to stay home when Jordan Bell and Curry crisscross: But they aren't as well-versed as the Rockets in the minutia of an anti-Warriors switching scheme, or as naturally talented on defense. Also: The Warriors are awesome. They inspire paranoia. You can understand Jeff Green, guarding Livingston before Livingston's layup shown above, thinking to himself: My guy is about to screen for Stephen freaking Curry. If I don't switch early, I'm toast. By the midpoint of Game 2, the Warriors started preying on all of this -- the fear they inspire, the predictability of the Cavalier switches, Cleveland's intractable disadvantages. Sometimes it was as simple as Curry giving the ball up, and diving behind a McGee pick: Diabolical. Curry knows Love is going to switch off of McGee. He knows that by cutting hard toward the basket, he will nudge Love in that direction. And he knows that when he moonwalks back into 3-point range, Love will rush out in a panic -- vulnerable to an easy blow-by. Sometimes it was more complex. Green slips his pick hard enough that his new defender -- freshly switched Jeff Green -- is behind him as he zooms to the basket.<doc-sep>
After a long regular season and playoffs, we're back once again to find out who will win the 2018 NBA Finals. As in the past four years, the NBA championship matchup is between the same two heavyweights: the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers. If you'd like to know all the ways you can watch, check out our guide. Even though the Warriors are up 2-0, there's still no telling who will win this Finals showdown, especially now that the series is headed to the Cavaliers home turf in Cleveland. Will Lebron James recover from two games wrought with disappointment? Will he repeat his previous performances when his team has been down 0-2? Even more importantly, Andre Iguodala, a key defender for the Warriors who missed the first two games, was just announced as a game-time decision to return to the lineup. Will his presence seal the deal for the Warriors? The only answers will come during tonight's Game Three matchup. In Game Two, Golden State point guard Stephen Curry made NBA Finals history, shot a record nine three-pointers, scored a game-high 33 points and lead the Warriors to a decisive victory over the Cavs, 122-103. The defending champion Warriors managed to squeak out a 124-114 win in Game One of the seven-game series in overtime, even after Lebron James scored an astounding 51 points for the Cavaliers. The next game in the series is on Wednesday, June 6 at 6:00 p.m. PT, 9:00 p.m. ET at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. Wait, it's the Warriors and Cavaliers again? Despite the best efforts of promising teams like the Houston Rockets, Boston Celtics and Toronto Raptors, the Warriors and Cavaliers managed to pull it off once again in their respective conference finals. Some fans are tired of the same matchup every year, but there are plenty of reasons why these two teams keep coming back. Though the Warriors were favored to win at the beginning of the season, they had some rocky stints this year, raising the question of whether they could return to the NBA Finals. Injuries caused two-time MVP Stephen Curry to play in only 51 of 82 games this season. The Rockets, their biggest threat on the road to the finals, managed to capture the number 1 seed in the West. But behind the consistency of Kevin Durant, the lock-down defense of Draymond Green and some dramatic efforts from both Klay Thompson and Curry in the western conference finals, the Warriors showed they could still move the ball, find open looks and beat Houston in their own house for the crucial game seven victory. The Cavaliers were seen as an even longer shot at making the NBA Finals. After trading away All-Star guard Kyrie Irving to the Boston Celtics and in return getting Isiah Thomas, who wouldn't play until January because of injuries, the outlook was surprisingly bleak. But when you have arguably the best player in NBA history, it became impossible to rule the Cavaliers out. The Celtics were favored to win the eastern conference finals against the Cavs having earned home court advantage, but Lebron would pull through in the end after a seven-game series. Though the Warriors are heavily favored to win, these teams know each other very well, and as we learned in the 2016 matchup between these two teams, anything can happen in an NBA game. Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET Why should I root for the Warriors? For years the Warriors almost never even got to the playoffs, much less the NBA Finals. In fact, when they won the championship in 2015, it had been 40 years since they their last NBA Finals appearance. The team's ascent began after drafting Stephen Curry in 2011, with the team making a number of keen draft, trade and development choices that turned them from a laughingstock to a powerhouse. Even though they've been dominant for years, it took a ton of work to get there, which could warrant your fandom. The Warriors also play fantastic team basketball. Even with four All-Stars in the starting lineup, every one of them has demonstrated an ability to either take over a game or play effective, unselfish basketball. If you enjoy seeing efficient, finely-tuned favorites, this is the team to back. Why should I root for the Cavaliers? If you like watching the best all-around player in basketball, look no further that Lebron James. He can do everything.