The beginnings of a dynasty? - darkwolf80's Blog

darkwolf80's Blog

The beginnings of a dynasty?

Posted on February 11, 2014 at 05:38 PM.

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The team held up its hot play going into the playoffs. as they breezed through the first three rounds and into the Finals.

Round one saw us facing the Atlanta Hawks with Carmelo Anthony and company.
We closed them out in 6 with the first two games being complete blowouts for us. The other 4 games were much closer as the Hawks were able to take games 4 at home and 5 on the road. In game 6 we went to the fourth with a 15 point lead. The Hawks made a valiant comeback that came up short, and we won 105-99. Irving was his normal solid self at 26ppg/4rpg/7apg. Holden was hurt going into round one and after coming back for one game re-hurt his ankle. This ended up limiting him for the rest of the playoffs until the Finals.

Round two had us facing the Detroit Pistons with Josh Smith, Andre Drummond and company.
We were able to close out this series in 5 by making a comeback in the fourth after being down 7 with only minutes to go in the deciding game. I think the Pistons could have made a much better effort if they had made proper use of their star rookie Ray Ray Francis. Their frontcourt is loaded with too many veterans to give him regular minutes. I truly believe he is going to end up a perennial All-Star someday real soon and they are going to regret holding him back. Irving had a pedestrian series with a 18ppg/4rpg/10apg series, as he found himself dishing out more than scoring. Parker did step up his scoring as he averaged 20ppg/7rpg/4apg. On another note the Thunder were knocked out by the Rockets in the second round on the other side of the bracket. No rematch this year.

The Conference Finals had us facing the defensive minded number two seed New York Knicks. This was Mayo's landing spot in FA after being spurned by us. They just didn't have enough firepower and their defense couldn't slow us down to give us any kind of series. We swept them while averaging 121ppg as a team. Both Waiters 27ppg/5rpg and Irving 28ppg/4rpg/6apg flashed their offensive genius throughout the series.

This all led to the NBA Finals and a matchup with the number 2 seed in the Western Conference the Houston Rockets. If you remember they were one of the big winners in FA during the offseason, by signing K. Bryant and E. Gordon. They already had a pretty stacked team of J. Harden, C. Parsons, and D. Howard. This looked on paper like a pretty good matchup. However, taking the experience of last year we jumped out to a 3-0 lead. It looked like we would breeze to our second title in a row. But Harden and company had other ideas. Taking our historic comeback last year as motivation they won game 4 and 5 by 17 and 21 respectively. Their thoughts in the press were, "If the Bobcats could do it last year, why not us this year?" So we started to feel the pressure going back home for game 6. We did not want to face a game 7 with that pressure mounting. We were finally able to cool off Harden in game 6. We went into the fourth with a 14 point lead and 12 minutes away from the title. But the Rockets had one last push and didn't want to make it easy as they slowly chipped away the lead in the fourth. Minute by minute our lead was shrinking until at one point we were tied. After a four point play by Irving with less than a minute to play and a defensive stop we were able to hold them off for a 107-103 win. We could finally breath and enjoy the 2017 NBA championship and being a repeat champion. Irving was Finals MVP again with a 24ppg/4rpg/8apg average.

As we were leaving the arena after the locker room champagne celebration and headed to Jordan's mansion for the after party, Jordan pulled me aside and said, "We need to talk tomorrow about your future." I grinned and said "Yes sir."
But for tonight it was nothing but cigars and basking in the glory.