It wasn't just the otherworldly shot-making from LeBron James, though that was part of it. It wasn't just that the Toronto Raptors misguidedly left C.J. Miles on an island defending Kevin Love during their disastrous third quarter, though that was part of it, too. On Thursday, the Cleveland Cavaliers' offense fired on all cylinders, exploiting every poor decision Toronto made and proving once again that the simple formula of surrounding James with shooters and rim runners can make opponents look helpless.
The Cavaliers took a commanding 2-0 lead in their second-round series with a 128-110 victory, scoring a ridiculous 72 points in the second and third quarters and finishing with an astonishing 138.9 offensive rating. James controlled the game completely, as he tends to do, but his 43-point, 14-assist, eight-rebound stat line doesn't even tell the whole story.
The most impressive stat of the night for Cleveland: It committed just three turnovers, including just one from James. The Cavs' slow, deliberate style is not always pretty, but it has proven to work. James understood that the Raptors did not want to send help his way, so he calmly operated one-on-one, finding open shooters and cutters and, when he felt like it, calling his own number. It just so happened that James was in a zone and made seven fadeaway jumpers in the second half, per ESPN Stats & Info via Brian Windhorst, but even if he hadn't been feeling it with his jumper, he had Toronto wrapped around his finger.
After a rough series opener, Love scored 31 points on 11-for-21 shooting in Game 2, adding 11 rebounds for good measure. J.R. Smith had another strong performance, with 15 points on 5-for-8 shooting. George Hill had 13 points, Jeff Green had 14 points off the bench and Cleveland took almost no low-percentage shots (outside of James' contested fadeaways, which were high-percentage shots on Thursday). All of the talk about James' supposed lack of help during the Cavs' first-round series against the Indiana Pacers suddenly seems outdated: They were scoring so effortlessly that it silenced the crowd and demoralized the No. 1 seeded team in the East. Even Drake was quiet after this eruption.
The big question now is whether this is more about Cleveland or Toronto. The Raptors had top-five defense in the regular season, but they slipped on that end down the stretch. This series has presented serious matchup problems for them, and they have not come close to figuring out how to deal with the Love vs. Jonas Valanciunas conundrum.
Maybe they just lack the quick, athletic and disciplined defenders that allowed Indiana to make life so tough on the Cavaliers in the first round. Maybe the Pacers lucked out because Hill and Love weren't healthy and coach Tyronn Lue hadn't quite figured out who he could rely on. Maybe coach Dwane Casey isn't using the right lineup combinations. Regardless, the Raptors are now in an absolutely awful place, left lamenting Serge Ibaka's inexplicably poor performance and the fact they threw away an eminently winnable series opener.
As inconsistent as Cleveland has been throughout the season, though, it is possible that we are witnessing this team find itself. Its formula for returning to the NBA Finals was always clear: Have a good enough defensive game plan to avoid bleeding points like it did at times during the regular season, and be totally unguardable on the other end. Against Indiana, there were moments where the Cavs looked downright incompetent offensively. It never quite made sense -- they were fifth in offensive rating in the regular season and they employ James -- but it raised real concerns about whether or not they had the proper pieces to make a deep run in the postseason.
Those concerns could reappear as soon as Saturday's Game 3 in Cleveland, but they seem much less significant now. When asked where he has seen the most improvement out of his team in the playoffs, Lue simply said that the offense has picked up. This was a massive understatement.
With the Raptors getting crushed in their own building by a familiar foe, there will surely be noise about them being the "same old team" that was swept by the Cavaliers last year. While the result might repeat itself, it should be noted that Toronto's reinvented offense worked -- it was able to generate good looks all night and scored 119.8 points per 100 possessions. The problem, of course, is the same one the entire conference has been trying to solve for the last eight seasons: How do you stop a LeBron-led offense?
If Cleveland keeps playing like this, there might not be any answers in the East.
