The Toronto Raptors were supposed to trap LeBron James. Raptors head coach Dwane Casey wanted to force the Cavaliers to have someone on the team not named LeBron beat them in Game 3 on Saturday. But even the best plans often go awry, especially when you’re facing arguably the best NBA player on the planet today. Toronto came to that realization immediately after James knocked down the game-winning, buzzer-beater last night that effectively turned their deficit from an 0-2 to an 0-3.
“Our goal in the timeout was to trap him and make someone else beat us,” Casey said, perUSA TODAY. “He split the trap and went 100 miles an hour down the floor and lost them. We just didn’t execute. It was probably my fault that I didn’t make it clear that we wanted to trap him and get the ball out of his hands. We had it started in the backcourt, and for whatever reason, we let him out of the trap.”
Regardless of how awkward the shot may have looked coming out of James’s hand, he and his Cavaliers teammates admit that he prepares for anything and everything that can come his way in a game. “What you come to find out as his teammate and playing with him is that he practices those shots all the time and makes them all the time,” Love said. “I practice pretty much every shot I take in a game and no matter if it’s the first quarter or a game-winner, I feel pretty comfortable,” LeBron admits. It’s all part of The King having his “ability to have different things in my toolbox.”
There was an option on the play that involved having Kyle Korver set a screen to free up James, but it didn’t matter because all LeBron needed to do was search deep inside his toolbox to pull off that magic last night.
