LeBron James finished Sunday’s game with 40 points, 11 assists and 14 rebounds, making it his second triple-double of the Finals. But James is being overworked, which is why he will be denied another Championship ring this year.
James is averaging 29.9 points per game for the entire playoffs and 36.6 points per game in the Finals. When one player is being forced to carry that big of a workload, it is inevitable that he will get burnt out eventually. In the game four loss to Golden State, James had his lowest scoring total of the Finals, scoring 20 points and shooting only 31 percent from the field. It was obvious that the workload placed on his shoulders finally caught up to him which resulted in a 21 point blowout.
Even when James performs at a high level for most of the game, he still seems to come up short. Because without Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, there is nobody else for the team to look to other than LeBron. Before the series started, I said J.R. Smith was going to have to show up big for Cleveland if they wanted to have any chance at winning this year’s Finals.
He is averaging 10 points per game this series, which would be good enough if Irving was still playing. But since he isn’t, the team needs Smith to do more than what has normally been expected of him, and he has not shown up like Cleveland needs him to. In the two games that the Cavaliers did win, Smith shot 40 percent from the 3-point line. When Smith shoots well from behind the arc, it normally ends well for Cleveland.
Smith started game five with 14 points in the first half, and it looked like he was going to have a huge game but never scored again in the second half. So once again, James was left to carry the team for the remainder of the game. He did a great job of rebounding, scoring and assisting to keep his team in the game. But when you have to do that every night for the whole game those last few minutes are hard to finish.
Golden State went on a 19-7 run in the last five minutes of the game to take the 104-91 victory. Although James racked up incredible stats during the first 55 minutes of the game, it’s those last five minutes that are most important. James uses all of his energy just to keep the game close. So when the team looks for him to take over and win the game in crunch time, James is too tired at that point because he’s been giving his all the entire game just to stay close.
The reason why Golden State is so good is because they have so many weapons to choose from. While James is averaging over 36 points per game in the series, Steph Curry has only scored over 30 points in one game. The reason why is because the Warriors are a better a team, Curry doesn’t need to carry his team in the way the James is forced to. Andre Iguodala has really stepped up for the Warriors this series. He came into the Finals averaging 7.8 points per game in the playoffs and is now averaging 14.6 point Finals and 17 last three games.
Not only has he improved his scoring but he has been playing tremendous defense on James down the stretch, which is a major reason why Golden State has been able to win the close games. With that being said, it is obvious that the Warriors are the better team and Curry has more help than LeBron, which is why the Warriors will be crowned the 2015 Finals Champions.
