CLEVELAND -- The Cleveland Cavaliers needed just one win at the Air Canada Centre to take away home-court advantage from the No. 1 team in the East, the Toronto Raptors, and they did one better in the first two games of the 2018 Eastern Conference Semifinals.
With a dominant 128-110 Game 2 win over the Raptors in Toronto Thursday night, the Cavaliers bring a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series back to Cleveland, where they will host Game 3 at Quicken Loans Arena tonight, but they know there is much work yet to be done.
“We’re not satisfied,” Cavaliers small forward LeBron James said following the Game 2 win. “We came up and played some good basketball up here, but we look forward to even more of a challenge come Saturday.”
James led the team with 43 points, 14 assists and eight rebounds over 40 minutes of action in the Game 2 win, and he got plenty of help from the supporting cast, namely center Kevin Love, shooting guard JR Smith, reserve forward Jeff Green and point guard George Hill.
Love registered a double-double with 31 points and 11 rebounds, while Smith (15 points), Green (14) and Hill (13) also finished in double figures for the Cavaliers.
As a team, the Cavaliers committed just three turnovers in Game 2 and only nine over the first two games in the series.
“For me and for our ball club, no matter who we’re going against, we just try to be as great as we can be, no matter if it’s the Indiana Pacers or the Toronto Raptors or whatever team we’ve played in the last four years,” James said.
“We just try to go out and just play as well as we can. Our coaching staff has given us a great game plan. You guys can have that narrative of a mental edge or whatever the case may be, but for me, personally, my mental edge is how I prepare myself every night, how I go about the game plan, try to not make mistakes and if I do make mistakes, making sure I don’t do it again to compound the mistake. That’s it.”
According to James, the Cavaliers “just want to try to continue to get better every game” because with a team that has been together less than three months going against the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference, he knows anything can happen.
“These two games are over,” James said. “Now, we can get our minds right for Game 3. It’s one game at a time, and that’s the only way we should look at it. We will not put our guards down. I won’t, so that’s going to trickle down to everybody else. Understanding that the series is never won until it’s over, we’ve got to win four games to get out of a series, and it starts with the next game.”
