The Cleveland Cavaliers are facing the real possibility of falling into a 3-0 series hole against the defending champion Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals.
A loss at home on Wednesday would pretty much end Cleveland’s hopes of bringing a title back to the downtrodden sports city.
In this, Cavaliers star LeBron James is stating the obvious — that Wednesday’s outing is a must win for his squad.
“It’s a do-or-die game for us. We can’t afford to go down 3-0 to any team, especially a team that’s 73-9 in the regular season and is playing the type of basketball they’re playing,” James said, via Scout.com. “So we understand that. We’re going to come in and give everything that we’ve got and leave it on the floor.”
As James noted, expecting to win four in a row against a squad that lost nine games in 82 regular season outings isn’t necessarily a recipe for success.
More than that, history itself tells us teams that find themselves in a 3-0 series hole in a best-of-seven are pretty much guaranteed to lose said series.
No team in the history of the NBA has come back to win four in a row in a series. In fact, it’s happened a grand total of five times across all four major professional sports leagues in North America.
The last time it happened was when the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings overcame a 3-0 series deficit to defeat the San Jose Sharks back in 2014.
All said, the NHL represents four of the five times this has occurred with the Boston Red Sox’ astonishing comeback against the New York Yankees back in 2004 being the only outlier.
Not only does Cleveland find itself down 2-0 in the series, it was outscored by a NBA Finals record 48 points in the first two games. Overall, the Cavaliers have lost seven consecutive games to Golden State by a combined 130 points dating back to last year’s Finals.
James knows that Wednesday’s game is a must win. It’s now all about him and his teammates picking their game up in the face of such defying odds. If that happens, we could very well have an entirely new series following Game 3. If not, Warriors fans will be getting out their brooms.
