Amidst all of this, the undeniable fact gets lost that LeBron brought a team that was 33-49 the previous year with Kyrie Irving at the helm all the way to the Finals and two wins short of a championship. Kevin Love didn't play particularly well in the regular season and copped a lot of criticism for being ineffective and unable to find a rhythm, and Kyrie and him missed significant amount of the playoffs with injuries. It is really amazing when you start to grasp how monumental a feat it is to haul this depleted Cavs team to a 2-1 series lead in the Finals. Iggy played great defense on LeBron, I'll give him some credit, but to say that he was the reason for LeBron being ineffective on offense is a disservice to LeBron. LeBron averaged 45 minutes a game this series, he was their primary ball handler for most of the series, the dubs defense could help out on him and converge without fearing offense from anyone else, the Cavs had little option but to run iso plays over and over again where LeBron had to force the defense to react and either finish on a drive or kick out, he was burning the candle of both ends of the court trying to play defense and rebound and because the Cavs had no other consistent offensive threat, he had to take far more shots to even give them a chance to stay close. Even an elite athlete like LeBron will become fatigued and his legs would give on his jumpshots and he loses half a step in finishing at the rim. Igoudala played him well, but a good offense will beat good defense any day. LeBron just ran out of gas and the lack of any viable scoring option made it hard to spread the court for him to be effective, and as a result he forced a lot of shots up and few were taken in the flow of an offensive set. Then when LeBron started settling for jumpshots because he's gassed, he couldn't quite get his legs underneath him to make them. Too much credit is given to Igoudala on defense without considering the other nuances that contributed to LeBron being inefficient.
