NBA Championship Odds
The 2015 NBA Finals matchup is set. It’s the showdown fans everywhere wanted to see. The Golden State Warriors — the best team in the league — is set to take on the Cleveland Cavaliers — the team with the planet’s best player: LeBron James.
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Golden State Warriors
Regular Season Record: 67-15
Conference Standing: 1st
Odds To Win NBA Championship: 5/12
All season long, the Golden State Warriors looked like the team to beat. As it turns out, that’s still the case with the NBA championship officially on the horizon.
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Led by MVP Stephen Curry, this group looks virtually unstoppable. The New Orleans Pelicans didn’t stand a chance in Round 1. The Memphis Grizzlies gave them enough of a scare to shock them back into superiority following Round 2. The Houston Rockets only mustered a single win in the Western Conference Finals.
Now awaits LeBron James and a rather unpredictable group in the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The primary task will be containing James. Then again, it’s assumed that The King is going to get his whether it’s Andre Iguodala, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green or a combination of the entire roster hoping to stop him. What the Warriors really need to focus on is containing the role players. J.R. Smith can’t get a game where he scores 28 off the bench, as we saw him do against Atlanta. Iman Shumpert can’t be a reliable offensive weapon.
And yes, in this case, with the injuries he’s been dealt, Kyrie Irving becomes a role player as well. Containing the All-Star point guard will be difficult assuming he’s healthy after nine days rest, but it will be a necessity for the Warriors to come out on top.
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Cleveland Cavaliers
Regular Season Record: 53-29
Conference Standing: 2nd
Odds To Win NBA Championship: 19/10
We’ve already gone over the X-factors for Cleveland in this series. Smith, Shumpert and Irving will all play off of LeBron’s momentum, and high-scoring outputs (or at least efficient outputs) from those three will make a huge difference in keeping up with the Warriors’ high-powered offense.
One other name you can’t ignore is Tristan Thompson. The power forward has stepped in and almost — almost — made fans in Cleveland forget about Kevin Love. There’s no denying this team would love to have its starting power forward back in the lineup, but Thompson has proven to be a better rebounder at this point in the process, which has led to numerous crucial baskets made by hustle plays at the rim.
Defensively, the Cavs must take a page out of the blueprint that Memphis gave us in Round 2. That page is the one that says Steph Curry and Klay Thompson won’t get past halfcourt without meeting a defender.
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If Cleveland can chase these high-octane shooters off the three-point line throughout this series, it will give the Cavaliers a huge advantage that the no team (except for the Grizzlies for two games) has had against Golden State thus far in the postseason.
Prediction
This series is going to come down to how the Cavaliers can perform. We know what we’re going to get from the Warriors, but it’s the Cavs who are the wild cards with health and consistent play as the biggest X-factors.
Despite having the most postseason experience on the roster, this one belongs to the Warriors. A five-game series would be a bit too audacious of a prediction with Cleveland getting nine days rest before the Finals tip off, but a six-game series seems likely — and if nothing else, wrapping this one up at home in Game 7 seems like a worst-case scenario for this year’s best team.
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