James Jones, the Wine and Gold’s sharpshooting reserve has played in 130 postseason games over the course of his 12-year career – winning a pair of NBA titles among his five straight trips to the NBA Finals.
As the Cavaliers battle the Golden State Warriors in their best-of-seven series – Cavs.com asked the savvy vet to share his thoughts throughout this season’s Playoff run …
Even down 0-2, we’re good. We’re feeling good about tonight.
We’re back home and we’ve been playing amazing in this building – in the Playoffs, all season long. We have a very good rhythm in this building. We have a good feel, offensively. We just play so much better at home.
Defensively, we’ve been solid in spurts. We need to be much more consistent there. But offensively, we’re ignited when we come home. So we’re looking forward to tonight.
We need that lift on the offensive end. With Golden State, you can do a great job against them defensively; you can hold them under 100 points. But right now we’re not scoring the points we need to alleviate pressure on our defense and to make them play in the halfcourt.
"Setting the Stage"
"Going Next Level"
"Staying Sharp"
"Coat of Armor"
"Youth Movement"
Playing off missed shots – any team will tell you – when you’re playing off of misses, it’s so much easier. So right now, we just have to make shots. And we will. We’ll make shots tonight.
Coach Lue has been preaching “pace” since he took over and we’ve been playing with good pace through the Playoffs.
On Sunday night, again, I think we did well at picking up the pace in spurts. But we definitely need to have better pace in the halfcourt.
It’s not just about how fast you get from end to end. You can’t play in “fastbreak mode” all game. But when we get in the halfcourt, we just have to get in a better tempo, get into a better pace. I think we did a decent job getting out in transition with our full-court pace, but we didn’t do a great job – at all – with our halfcourt pace. But we’ll rectify that tonight.
Like I’ve said before, Golden State is a team that makes you pay if you make mistakes. They’re a team that dares you to be consistent, defensively as well as offensively. And we got frustrated with our results. We got frustrated and started pressing.
We had some passes we shouldn’t have made. And we need to share the ball better – a LOT better. But we didn’t do that.
It’s night and day when you look at the way we’ve played when we share the ball and the way we play when we’re trying to do it all from the top-down. We have to be better at that, because the Warriors are a team that thrives when you play top-down.
But when you move the ball – just as they do – and you shift their defense from side to side, you can get really good looks. They play small a lot, so that allows you the opportunities for offensive rebounds and it also allows you to get good looks at the basket because they don’t have that traditional seven-foot rim protector.
It’s a sports cliché, but you really have to take these games – especially these – one game at a time, because in the Playoffs, one game is a momentum builder. One game can start your rhythm. You can have one game that changes the entire flow, that changes the feel of the series.
It’s a constant battle of adjustments and improvements, so you just improve one game at a time. You can’t improve four games all at once.
So we’re just excited to be back at home.
That’s why teams fight so hard for homecourt advantage, so they can start the series off at home. Game 7 at home is big, but starting at home gets you in your rhythm early. We’ve been no different.
They did their job, now it’s time to do ours. And right now, we just have to protect homecourt.