I’m back from my Memorial Day vacation and I’ve been waiting to get this one off about Cleveland’s demise. There was a point during Game 4 when the camera panned across Rocket Arena and you could see Knicks fans celebrating while Cavaliers fans sat frozen in their seats trying to process what had just happened.
And for Golden State Warriors fans who enjoyed a bitter rivalry with The Land, this was pretty amusing not just because Cleveland lost. I mean, the Warriors and Cavaliers haven’t really been
rivals in years. LeBron left and the Dubs are figuring out who they are at this juncture of their dynasty. But there is still something deeply funny about watching the Cavaliers spend years trying to convince themselves they had rebuilt a contender only for the whole thing to collapse under the bright white lights of the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Knicks didn’t just beat Cleveland. They swept them with aggression, finishing it all off by walking into Rocket Arena and winning by 37 points for good measure, 130-93. They turned what should have been Cleveland’s biggest game in years into a three-hour public humiliation.
By halftime the arena already sounded nervous. By the fourth quarter it sounded like Manhattan had annexed Ohio. Donovan Mitchell finished with 31 points because Donovan Mitchell is genuinely one of the most gifted scorers alive. That part was never the problem. The problem was everything orbiting around him. James Harden went 0-for-6 from three and finished minus-19. The Cavaliers turned the ball over 22 times. The Knicks won the rebounding battle 60-33 and got a plus-28 explosion from Landry Shamet off the bench because everybody wearing blue looked comfortable while Cleveland looked like it was trying to solve a math equation in front of the class.
And honestly? Warriors fans already knew where this was headed.
The Cavaliers spent the first two rounds of the playoffs leaking oil everywhere. Seven games against Toronto. Seven games against Detroit. Then they blew a 22-point fourth-quarter lead in Game 1 against New York and spiritually never recovered from it. Even when the score stayed close later in the series, the energy didn’t. The Knicks looked like a team discovering itself. Cleveland looked like a team slowly realizing it had miscalculated something important.
The Cavaliers had talent all over the floor this season. Mitchell is phenomenal. Evan Mobley remains terrifying defensively. Harden can still manipulate a defense when he has space to breathe. But the deeper this series went, the more Cleveland looked like a team relying on individual rescue attempts while New York looked like five people operating the same machine. That is what real contenders look like. This was the Knicks kicking the door off the hinges and spending four games revealing how fragile Cleveland actually was.
And from a Warriors perspective, there was something nostalgic about it.
The old Cavaliers used to walk into Finals games with LeBron James carrying the emotional weight of an entire franchise on his back like a demigod. You always felt pressure radiating off those teams even when Golden State was better. This version felt different. Talented? Absolutely. But watching this series, there was never a moment where they felt inevitable. So now the Knicks head to the NBA Finals for the first time in over 25 years while Cleveland heads into an offseason full of uncomfortable questions about roster construction, identity, and whether this core is actually built for deep playoff basketball. Judging by the brooms falling from the sky all over Ohio this week, the East takeover might need to wait. I feel overall glad that former Warriors assistant coach Kenny Atkinson got to take his team so far, but it’s sad to see him chained to Cleveland’s curse.
The lights came on and the Cavaliers blinked. And somewhere deep in the soul of Dub Nation, a lot of people probably smiled watching it happen.
