National Basketball Association

How the Cavs-Warriors front court matchup will decide the Finals and reveal the NBA's future

Published Jun. 3, 2015 11:38 a.m. ET

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LeBron James, Stephen Curry. Resident king and upcoming prince respectively, these two superstars bring two of the sport’s most popular faces to the billing for this year’s NBA Finals.

As they should. James is deep into his efforts at proving himself as the greatest to ever take the court. Curry, for his part, is well on his way to establishing himself as the history’s best in at least one category: Shooting, a task he is so good at that he’s changing the way we imagine the game.

Both of these guys are incredible, and there’s little you can do to stop either. The Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers each have an impressive collection of defenders to throw at these men to slow them down at times, but in the end, they’ll get theirs.

It’s what happens elsewhere that could very well decide this season’s championship. Namely, in the front court. The Warriors have already dispatched some outstanding specimens down low in their journey to this point, including Anthony Davis, Marc Gasol, Zach Randolph and Dwight Howard. Cleveland’s Tristan Thompson and Timofey Mozgov are not as accomplished or as starry as those men, but they just might bring Golden State their trickiest challenge yet in the paint.

Thompson has had an inspired postseason run. One so good, in fact, that it’s given a lot of speculators pause about Kevin Love’s future with the team. While Love is a deserved All-Star and talented enough to build an efficient offense around, Thompson has all but proved himself as the more harmonious, useful complement to James. His daylong pursuit on the glass has been positively Rodmanesque, as has his constantly annoying presence as a defender. Thompson’s been doing all the things James has less energy for as he reaches his thirties, filling in as the perfect custodian he’s never had since Love went down for the year with a shoulder injury.

Golden State’s Draymond Green, Thompson’s likely matchup, has been on fire for even longer. Emboldened since he got the starting nod in last season’s playoffs, Green has been a blaze of tongue-wagging swagger who has given this 67-win team the hype and hustle needed to propel them to the creme of the league. If Green wasn’t going to be so busy with Thompson, he’d get more minutes guarding LeBron. A close second in the Defensive Player of the Year voting, Green has proved to be a utility belt of extreme value.

Neither Green nor Thompson will see what we historically expect from big men on title contenders: post-ups. The same goes for the teams’ starting centers in the Warriors’ Andrew Bogut and the Cavs’ Mozgov. While Thompson and Green will be counted on to do a lot of defensive switching and operate all the way out to the perimeter on defense, Bogut and Mozgov will probably have orders to try staying at the rim to protect that precious real estate as much as possible.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that these teams’ small forwards, James and Harrison Barnes, will end up with more back-to-the-basket action than any of big men in the series. In the modern NBA, being big doesn’t mean what it used to. The Warriors’ showed a shrewd understanding of defensive strategy in the Western Conference finals when they swarmed Dwight Howard every time he got an old-fashioned post moment, and they got a lot of turnovers out of him for it.

Although Green is the only starting big on either team with much shooting range (although he hasn’t had it in these playoffs, making just 27 percent of his shots from beyond the arc), all of them are fitting into what the NBA will expect from most bigs in the future. Duke’s Jahlil Okafor, a prospective No. 1 overall pick in June’s draft, is seen by many as a swan-song figure for the block, standing as maybe the last down-low scorer worthy of building offense around for some time.

What both the Cavs’ and Warriors’ big men will do is take advantage of, and fit into, the pace and space provided by the dynamism in their backcourts and on the wings. Cleveland has a more cohesive, potent collection of perimeter creators than anyone the Warriors have seen yet—even it’s really only because of LeBron—and as such they afford Thompson and Mozgov a lot of extra license all over the floor. Both of them have capitalized on that so far in these playoffs, and it’s been an integral part of their success.

Packing the paint on post-ups won’t work for Golden State as it did against the Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies, because the Cavs wont be pausing the ball down there. Instead, both of Cleveland’s big men are doing great things off the ball and helping accelerate James’ game to galactic heights. Golden State has shown they can make many adjustments. And surely they’ve got another tough one on their plate in these Finals.