CHICAGO (NBA.com exclusive) -- Mike Brown was asked not long before tipoff Sunday whether his Cleveland Cavaliers had the appropriate level of confidence for a team with championship aspirations. There wasn't much swagger in the Cavs coach's answer.
"Our confidence level's high," Brown said, though not all that convincingly. Maybe he was caught off-guard by the question, maybe he wasn't entirely sure himself, but how he said it seemed to speak louder than what he said. "We feel like we can win on anybody's floor. We definitely can win on our home floor. We feel like the confidence level is there."
About four hours later, LeBron James -- his day's work done (37 points, 12 rebounds, 11 assists), his throttling of the Chicago Bulls in a 121-98 Game 4 victory at United Center complete -- offered the answer Brown could have given. He likes Chicago, James said, but he's not coming back.
In other words, no Game 6.
Confidence? Bah. These guys have LeBronfidence.
So goes the Cavaliers' postseason, which will be spent with somebody's palm across their foreheads and someone else's fingers on their collective pulse. Each series, each round, each spring, people like to gauge the confidence, cohesiveness and mood of playoff teams, none more so than the favorites. That means the Lakers out West, based on their status as defending NBA champions. In the East, given their No. 1 seeding, the Cavaliers are the ones getting the around-the-clock monitoring. The slightest blip would show up in a crawl across the bottom of whatever games were on the sports channels at that instant.
Latest medical update: Cleveland is fine. Twelve hearts beating as one. Tap them in the knees -- that's what their 108-106 loss in Game 3 was -- and the Cavaliers' reflexes are true: They instinctively defend harder and smarter. Like all of us, they could probably stand to mix in more fruits and vegetables but that can wait, because the diet for at least another game calls for more red meat.
Speaking of the Bulls, reports of their demise aren't so much exaggerated as slightly premature. Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, coach Vinny Del Negro have until Tuesday night at Quicken Loans Arena to stir from their first-round death bed. But from the looks of things Sunday, their plug got pulled sometime in the second or third quarters, when Cleveland dominated them 75-55.
"We were in the game from the beginning," James said after posting the fifth postseason triple-double of his career. "What changed is, we got more stops. Executed a little bit better offensively. And we kind of just forced our will on the game in the second half."
The result was a 25-7 stretch across halftime when the Cavaliers went from the wrong side of 45-44 to the right side of 69-52. James, who managed Cleveland's asserts while scoring just five points in the first quarter, had 11 points and an assist during the spurt. Then he sucked the air completely out of the building by nailing a buzzer-beater from just inside midcourt to make it 99-76 heading into the fourth.
And that really is what confidence in the playoffs is all about. Playing well. Winning the most recent game. And, uh, having the best player on the planet on your side.
Like we said: LeBronfidence.
"We've always been a confident bunch," James said. "We understand that every game is its own game. We can't go [into Game 4] thinking about, worrying about [Game 3]. Even though we lost Game 3, we didn't panic at all. We didn't doubt our abilities on the court. This is a really good team, but we knew that some of the mistakes we were making were our fault. Turning the ball over, not getting back in transition, allowing them to dominate the offensive boards. Those are things we can control."
By Sunday evening, the rotation of the planets around the sun seemed well within this guy's control, too. Never mind what happens this summer for James, for his coach, for his franchise -- it is hard to imagine anything from the inside derailing them. It was inconceivable to the other Cavs in Game 4.
"He had that look in his eye, knowing that we needed him to play a great game," Antawn Jamison said. "He did a great job setting the tone and putting guys on his back. He is a great leader and a great communicator in the locker room and in the huddle. ... There aren't many organizations that have a guy like that."
Cavs' guard Mo Williams said: "We talked before the game briefly. He told me he'd been ready to play since 11 o'clock -- and the game [started] at 2:30. So he set the tone before he even went on the floor. He had a presence about him that let you know as a teammate he was ready to play. That he was focused from the jump."
There were whispers in between Games 3 and 4 that the Cavs were pulling in various directions. Reporters saw fissures in Brown dialing up Shaquille O'Neal's minutes while James talked about needing young big man J.J. Hickson on the court. The delicate thing with teams expected not only to win but to breeze in the early rounds is that, when they don't, it starts to smell like failure.
Sometimes a team really is sick. In 2004, the Los Angeles Lakers were unraveling after three consecutive championships and a season of friction and individual agendas. It finally caught up with O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and coach Phil Jackson in the Finals against tighter, more together Detroit. Should Cleveland falter again -- as in losing a game or three more against tough competition, between now and early June -- the EMS corps will be out again, poking, prodding and diagnosing symptoms again.
But if James' team is the one that maybe needs to see a doctor, how come the other guys always look so much worse after a visit with him?
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