NBA Basketball Betting: Cleveland Cavaliers at Golden State Warriors

Game Five of the NBA Finals is scheduled for Monday night on the Golden State Warriors’ home court. The Cleveland Cavaliers have been downright embarrassing during this series and one has to think that the Toronto Raptors would have given a much better account of themselves. One thing about the Raptors–as Canada’s only professional basketball team they don’t have the sense of ‘entitlement’ that LeBron James and company seems to have. In any case, there’s a very good chance that we’ll be done with the NBA season after this game.

The Cleveland Cavaliers won Game Three at home and suckered bandwagon jumpers into thinking that they might ‘make it a series’. Wrong! Golden State posted another double digit win in Game Four and during and after that game the Cavaliers’ desperation became evident. There are reportedly ‘trust issues’ inside the Cleveland locker room that head coach Tyrone Lue is trying to address. He’s trying some high school level motivation tactics, challenging his team that if they ‘don’t think they can win’ they shouldn’t ‘get on the plane’.

Lue is also making a case for LeBron James to get more foul calls. True, James hasn’t been going to the line during as much during this series as he did during the regular season. The big difference might be that he wasn’t playing the Golden State Warriors’ swarming defense every night during the regular season. Meanwhile, LeBron was doing what he does best–whining about his fracas with the Warriors’ Draymond Green. LeBron is passive aggressively lobbying for Green to get suspended and trying to justify his behavior because–you guessed it–he was ‘disrespected’. That’s one major difference between the Warriors and the Cavs. Golden State earns respect on the basketball court. Cleveland–and particularly LeBron–act as if they’re entitled to it as a birthright.

Don’t be surprised if NBA/ESPN pulls out every trick in the book to try and get this series back to Cleveland for Game Six. It probably won’t work. The Cavaliers are something that you definitely won’t see in the Stanley Cup Finals–a flat out gutless team. They’re 2-5 ATS avenging a home loss. They’re 3-8 ATS after a loss by 10+ points. They’re done and hopefully the Warriors can put the proverbial fork in them.

BET GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS -7 OVER CLEVELAND CAVALIERS