Cavs! Pistons! It's pickup basketball on TNT!

That Game 5 was the most unwatchable double-OT game I’ve ever watched. I only caught the game at the start of the first overtime, but the two periods that followed were brutal. Only one Cavalier scored. And they were the winning team.

I’m still in disbelief that Cleveland won this game. Their offense was completely inept; every single trip down the court consisted of LeBron dribbling 30 to 35 feet away from the hoop, a few aborted screen and rolls (which obviously don’t work since Ilgauskas is slow and useless 20 feet away from the basket, Gooden fouled out early in OT, and Varajao just kind of jumped around), then LeBron would chuck up a shot from just inside the 3-point line, often fading away. I’ve heard quite about this (I know Bill Simmons has described the same thing a couple of times), but it’s different actually watching this train wreck than reading about it. It really is remarkable that LeBron made as many shots as he did given the circumstances, but his performance wasn’t as remarkable as it was made out to be; he took every single shot.

And since the Cavs gave up even trying to look like they were going to involve their other players in the offence as the game went on (Pavlovic might have actually been sitting down in the corner, no one would have noticed), that makes Detroit’s lack of an adjustment even more inexcusable.

They had success when trapping LeBron off screens and when sitting in a trapping zone, but for most of the time they let James burn them man-to-man. A single player scores 25 consecutive points and every point scored in both overtimes is the ideal situation to use a box-and-one or even a triangle-and-two zone! No one else was going to score, no one else was even trying! And yet with six seconds left, Lebron was guarded one-on-one and drove straight to the hoop through four Pistons for a clean layup.

None of this horrible mismanagement was really noted in the commentary that accompanied the game. I did hear a lot about offense-defense substitutions and timeout management, though.