NBA Finals 2016: When destiny jumped the tracks

Don’t believe the headlines. LeBron James did not win the 2016 NBA Finals all by himself ("King James dethrones Warriors," as one media outlet put it). He wasn’t even the difference for Cleveland, whose fans are basking in a long-overdue championship glow today.

That honor goes to Kyrie Irving.

We shouldn’t have believed the headlines about the Golden State Warriors, either. This was supposed to be a team of destiny, the team that would change the face of professional basketball as we know it.

In the end, it was the 2007 New England Patriots all over again.

THE ASTERISK

This year’s Warriors will go down in history not as a champion but an aberration, a regular-season asterisk next to a postseason disappointment. The 2015-16 Warriors will forever be remembered as the little engine that couldn’t, a team that should have won the title – and easily – but nearly got derailed in the semis and ran off the rails completely in the Finals.

How does this feel to the Warriors? Ask the ’07 Patriots, who were 18-0 before losing to a vastly inferior New York Giants team in the 2008 Super Bowl. Or ask George Foreman, undefeated and billed as “indestructible” when Muhammad Ali KO’d him in Zaire.

Both the Patriots and Foreman rebounded, but in different ways. The Pats have been back to the Super Bowl twice, winning once, in 2015. Foreman was so shaken by his loss to Ali that he took a year off, then retired for good another year later when Jimmy Young beat him on a decision in 1977. Foreman stayed out of the ring for a decade before launching a comeback that resulted him recapturing the heavyweight title with a stunning knockout of Michael Moorer at nearly 46 years of age.

Foreman was never again “indestructible,” and the Patriots have never again been undefeated heading into the Super Bowl. They both missed a chance at history that never came around again. The same is likely true of the Warriors, who can’t be expected to win 74 games next year or the year after that or the year after that.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

They’ll have to live with the emptiness of this year’s “what if,” just as Patriots have to live with that lost opportunity against the Giants, and Foreman struggled to come to grips with what he behind left in the ring against Ali. Both the Pats and Big George went on to distinguish themselves in different ways, though: the Patriots by winning their fourth Super Bowl of the century in 2015 – more than any other team so far – and Foreman by becoming the oldest man ever to win the NBA title.

Will the Warriors bounce back to similar greatness? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, they’ve been given the bitterest of pills to swallow: a might-have-been glory that never was and the irony that last year’s excellent championship team turned out to be better than this year’s “team for the ages.”

In part, that’s because Stephen Curry’s shooting touch largely failed him in the Finals, as did Klay Thompson’s. Draymond Green played up to his usual standards but missed a game because of a suspension, and 7-foot center Andrew Bogut was lost in Game 5 to a knee injury, leaving the Warriors totally reliant on their small-ball lineup and without anyone to counter Tristan Thompson or James in the paint.

Anderson Varejão, the former Cavalier who picked up many of the minutes Bogut would have played, was ineffective to the point of being a liability. It was during his time on the court in Game 7 that the momentum swung from the Warriors, who kept trying to feed him the ball (with disastrous results) to Cleveland.

THE DIFFERENCE

The Warriors didn’t just lose the series, the Cavaliers won it, and they deserve all the credit in the world for coming back from a 3-1 series deficit, something no other team had ever accomplished in the Finals. But while James got almost all the credit in the next day’s headlines, he wasn’t the one who made the difference.

Yes, his play was outstanding, and there’s no way the Cavaliers would have won without him. But he actually played better in last year’s loss to the Warriors, when he averaged 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds and 8.8 assists. His numbers this year: 29.7, 11.3 and 8.9.

No, the difference wasn’t James, it was guard Kyrie Irving, who played just one game in last year’s Finals before being injured but averaged 27.1 points while starting all seven games this year, including 41 points on 17 of 24 shooting in the pivotal Game 5 and the three-point shot that won the decisive Game 7.

Take Irving out of the equation, and the result would have been the same as last year, even with Curry’s and Klay Thompson’s shooting woes. Put Irving back in last year’s lineup, and – if he’d have played like this – the Warriors could easily have lost.

But those are just more “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

The Cavaliers had to live with their own “if onlys” for this past year, but to be honest, they were never a team of destiny, an other-worldly entity that was supposed to transform the game of basketball. This year’s Warriors were both those things … until suddenly they weren’t. And win or lose next year, they’ll have to live with that for a very long time.

L.A. Rams' return: The good, the bad and the ugly

There's a lot to like about the Los Angeles Rams coming home. I say "Los Angeles Rams" not because of the NFL's decision to return them to Southern California, but because that's what they'll always be to me ... and what they always have been.

The Raiders have always been associated, first and foremost, with Oakland, the Chargers with San Diego, and the Rams with ... Los Angeles. Not St. Louis, and not Cleveland, where they played for the first few years of their existence, but Los Angeles.

I was an L.A. Rams fan before Merlin Olsen was Father Murphy, when their helmets were blue and white, when they went into the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl leading the Pittsburgh Steelers. I was an L.A. Rams fan back in '78, when Warren Beatty starred in a movie called "Heaven Can Wait" about a Rams quarterback who died and came back to life in the body of a heartless tycoon. 

So I love the fact that the Rams are going back to L.A. But I've got to admit, there's also a lot not to like about how they got there. Here's a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the NFL's decision (Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016) to put the Rams back where they've always belonged.

The Good

In a word, history. In a name - or names: Norm Van Brocklin, Elroy Hirsh, Bob Waterfield, Jack Snow, Merlin Olsen, Deacon Jones, Lawrence McCutcheon, Jim Everett, Henry Ellard, Eric Dickerson, Flipper Anderson, Jack Snow, Tom Mack, Tom Fars, Les Richter, Jackie Slater, Jack Youngblood. 

If history were the deciding factor, there never would have been a discussion about which team belonged in Los Angeles. The Rams were there for 48 years (if you count their time in Anaheim), four times as long as the Raiders and Chargers combined. They were the first major team in the city, arriving from Cleveland more than a decade before the Dodgers, Angels and Lakers showed up, and they were the first NFL team on the West Coast.

Speaking of the West Coast, if geography were the deciding factor, allowing the NFC West would never have been transformed into the NFC 3 West + 1 Midwest and the natural San Francisco-Los Angeles rivalry would have been preserved.

If fans were the deciding factor, it would have been just as much of a slam dunk worthy of Wilt or Shaq. Poll after poll showed the Rams were the fans' overwhelming favorites to make an encore appearance. A Facebook page called "Bring Back the Los Angeles Rams" had been operating for some time, and fans rallied in Los Angeles to show the NFL their support. There was no such clamor to bring back the Raiders, despite their Super Bowl win with former USC great Marcus Allen, or the Chargers, who spent all of one season in L.A. compared to their subsequent half-century in San Diego.

The bad

But, ultimately, the deciding factor was - as it always seems to be with the NFL - money. A billionaire developer with marital ties to the Walmart fortune beat out a group backed by the Walt Disney Company CEO for dibs on L.A. It wasn't about football, it was about playing hardball. It was almost as if Leo Farnsworth - that heartless tycoon from "Heaven Can Wait" -  was somehow involved.

What would the unprincipled Farnsworth have done if he'd owned an NFL team? Maybe he would have threatened to leave town unless taxpayers anted up millions toward a new stadium. Maybe he would have insulted his team's fans for failing to support a second-rate product or its city for refusing to go along with his demands. 

One good thing you can say about Rams owner Stan Kroenke is that at least he's paying his own way to Los Angeles. But don't expect that to become a trend. Most of the NFL's other owners aren't as rich as Kroenke and prefer to extort money from working class taxpayers to build new stadiums that aren't really needed. They do this by threatening to move somewhere else.

In fact, the NFL has supported this tactic for the past 20 years by dangling Los Angeles like a poison pill in front of fans from Seattle to Minneapolis to Jacksonville and allowing its owners to say, "If you don't pay, we'll move to L.A."

But when the L.A. Clippers basketball team sold for an outrageous $2 billion, it became apparent that even this time-honored sword of Damocles wasn't as valuable as the pot of gold underneath the Hollywood sign. Kroenke recognized this and decided to cash in. He could move quickly because he had the money in hand; the Chargers and Raiders had to team up in order to challenge him, but even together they couldn't match his monetary muscle.

The ugly

L.A. may be out of the picture, but owners still have plenty of other teamless cities to use as bait in the "we want a new stadium now" game. Now there's St. Louis and, probably, San Diego to go along with such oft-mentioned sites as San Antonio, Toronto and London.

Kroenke was probably the only owner out there willing and able to spend all his own money on a new stadium, so the bluff-and-threat stadium sweepstakes is likely to continue unabated. Kroenke doesn't care now that he's got his. If the NFL had denied his petition to move, he could have sued for the right to do so or just ignored the league altogether. He knew this. The NFL knew this.

The Chargers and Raiders should have known it, too.

But now, after losing this high-stakes game of chicken, Chargers owner Dean Spanos finds himself between a rock and a hard place, having thumbed his nose at both Kroenke and the city of San Diego. Now, he's got to choose one or the other. Either Spanos will be a small fish in the big Los Angeles basin, playing second fiddle to the Rams in Kroenke's world, or he'll be one big ugly blowfish in San Diego, where there's plenty of resentment over how he turned his back on that city and its fans.

Spanos has zero leverage now with Kroenke, whose relocation to L.A. has already been approved and can afford to offer Spanos little more than the scraps that fall from his dinner table now that he has nothing to lose.

Raiders owner Mark Davis is in even worse shape, because his lease is up in Oakland and his stadium is one of those that actually should be replaced. (It's the only NFL stadium to double as a baseball park.)

But I don't feel sorry for either of them. The people I feel sorry for is the fans, who have become innocent bystanders in this game of chicken between the NFL and its cities. And in a game of chicken, when one tries to cross the road, he gets hit coming and going.

I think I'll go watch "Heaven Can Wait" now. The hero dies, but at least it has a happy ending, and it's a lot cheaper than a ticket to a real NFL game. I'll watch that on TV. And I'll root for the Rams. The Los Angeles Rams. That's all they ever should have been, and whether it be thanks to God or the devil or Leo Farnsworth, they're finally back where they belong.