Here are a few quick thoughts on Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Golden State Warriors:
Just throw out the regular season meetings between these teams. The two games, both Warriors victories, came when David Blatt was the Cavaliers coach, not Tyronn Lue.
Also, those two tilts occurred before the Cavaliers acquired Channing Frye. Frye has made 58 percent of his 3-pointers in the playoffs, the highest percentage of any player with more than 20 attempts.
The 3-point barrage that he and the Cavaliers have unleashed in the postseason gives them the scoring power to compete with the Warriors.
That said, they are catching the Splash Brothers at their most impactful. Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson both broke the previous record for 3-pointers in a playoff series during the Western Conference finals.
Lue is trying to accomplish what Steve Kerr did last year with the Warriors: win a championship in his first year as an NBA head coach. Prior to Kerr, the last coach to do that was Pat Riley with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1982. Like Lue, Riley took over the team during the season.
Curry just sent home Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook after they questioned his defensive capabilities. Now he faces LeBron James, who wasn't sure if Curry fit the definition of most valuable. Regardless of how it's defined, we know that James and Curry have six MVP trophies between them -- and now another chance to battle for the Larry O'Brien Trophy.
Back in January, Curry also addressed questions about those who diminished Golden State's 2015 title because Cleveland wasn't at full strength:
"Go back in history and find teams that weren't at full strength and still won, and find a team that beat a team that was kind of short-handed or whatever -- nobody really remembers that now. They remember the champions. We're OK with that. Hopefully we can do it again this year," Curry said.
This meeting of the Warriors and the Cavaliers will be the 13th time two teams have met in back-to-back NBA Finals. In those matchups, the teams have split the back-to-back series six times. The Chicago Bulls in 1997 and 1998 were the only team in the past seven repeat matchups to win both times (against the Utah Jazz).