“Whole game,” LeBron James said. “I’m playing the whole game.”
It was the first half of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ draining 105-101 win over the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of their exhausting playoff series on Sunday when James informed the home crowd that he intended to be on the court for all 48 minutes with the season on the line.
That he didn’t play the whole game was surprising considering it was just about the only thing that James couldn’t do in another epic game in which he scored 45 points to close another epic series in which he averaged 34.4 points, 10.1 rebounds, 7.7 assists. But that he even thought he had to play the whole game turned out to be the most revealing thing about the first round of the NBA playoffs. And that’s because there was nothing all that surprising about it.
The paradox of Cleveland winning this game and this series is that it showed why Cleveland can’t win for much longer.
The first round has been a working vacation for James in recent years. In fact, James hadn’t lost a single game in the first round since 2012, when the Miami Heat eked out a 4-1 series win over the New York Knicks. That’s how long it’s been since any team made James sweat this early: The Knicks were actually in the playoffs.
James could afford to play heavy minutes in the three first rounds since he came back to the Cavaliers because he knew that a sweep would give him more than a week of precious time to rest. The effort would be worth the reward on their inevitable road to the Finals.
The difference this year is that he didn’t have a choice. The Cavaliers lost as many games in the first round to the Pacers as they did in their six Eastern Conference series over the last two years combined, and they survived because they had James. But that’s not a strategy. It’s a problem: They only have James.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
Appeared in the April 30, 2018, print edition as 'Cavs Survive IN Game 7.'