So, what happens when the defending two-time champions play the worst team in basketball when the champions are at home and the worst team in basketball has suffered major injuries? One of the worst beatdowns in recent memory.
From the opening tip, the Cavaliers never had a chance against the Lakers. Los Angeles started the game off by hitting three straight wide-open threes, and it was all downhill from there for the Cavaliers. Without Anderson Varejao, the Cavs don’t anything approaching an adequate front line, let alone one that can keep up with Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol. The Laker big men did whatever they wanted against the Cavaliers, calmly picking apart the Cavs’ interior D with strong post moves, sharp interior passing, and easy offensive rebounds against the helpless Cavalier bigs.At one point, the Lakers were leading by 40 points, and Kobe had only scored three of them.
Offensively, the Cavaliers had even less success -- they had nobody who could get into the teeth of the Laker defense, make shots from outside, or score in the paint, and the offense often relied on Samardo Samuels trying to post up Bynum or Gasol or Manny Harris trying to shoot over Kobe Bryant. Neither of those options worked very well.
The Lakers outscored the Cavaliers 57-26 in the first half, and the crowd didn’t even appear to be enjoying it that much -- the Lakers’ destruction of the Cavaliers felt more like a team doing its solemn duty than a team handily winning an athletic competition. Phil Jackson summed everything up perfectly after the game when he said “Sadly, our size was a dominant factor in that ball game,” -- the Lakers didn’t so much win the game as they did empirically prove the Cavs had no business playing in it. After the game, Byron Scott said that he was “embarrassed” by his team’s performance and that the team played “scared” against the defending champs, and nobody was disagreeing with him. In a season of embarrassments and failures, highlighted by a month-and-a-half stretch with one win, the Cavaliers may have hit rock bottom in Los Angeles.