Cavaliers struggle but beat Warriors

By BRIAN WINDHORST

CLEVELAND — The Cavaliers’ winning streak is still alive, but then again, so is their finishing streak.

As expected, the Cavs handled the injury-depleted and road-weary Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night at The Q, 114-108, for their fifth straight win. But it was more difficult that it could have been — a trend that is riding sidesaddle with the hot streak.

For the fifth consecutive game, the Cavs were outscored in the fourth quarter and not in a meaningless away. The Warriors erased an 11-point lead and cut it down to one in the final minutes, necessitating some extra sweat at the start of a four-games-in-five-days stretch.

The game never seemed in true peril — the Warriors (3-7) hardly gave the impression they could get the defensive stops they needed — but over the past five games, the Cavs have been outscored by a combined 29 points in the fourth quarter. In all of them, they have come close to coughing up double-digit leads.

“It’s a concern, but there are a lot of other things to be concerned about,” Cavs coach Mike Brown said. “It wasn’t pretty, but we found a way to close the game.”

Last season, the Cavs (8-3) regularly turned opportunities like this one against the Warriors, who used just seven players due to injury problems, into laughers.

Posed that question, LeBron James flipped it around and gave a pretty good retort — sort of like the way he’s made sure the Cavs haven’t let any of the recent games slip away as he did with 31 points and a season-best 12 assists Tuesday.

“Putting teams away and winning by 20 or 25 is OK, but at the same time, when you win close games, it makes it a lot better for late in the season,” James said. “It is for the good that teams are making runs at us and we have to get stops.”

They did, outscoring the Warriors, 7-2, to finish the game. The victory was punctuated with an excellent three-part play with a minutes remaining. Anthony Parker picked off a steal by scrambling for a loose ball and heaved it to James, who took two dribbles and tossed a 35-foot lob to J.J. Hickson.

The Warriors show a lot of quickness and aggression in starting fast breaks but almost never in defending them, so Hickson was all alone at the rim for the dunk. It finished off a perfect offensive night for the ever-growing Hickson. He set a career high for a third consecutive game with 21 points on 9-of-9 shooting and tied a career high with nine rebounds.

“J.J. is still growing; he had a few plays tonight that were just him not concentrating the whole time,” James said. “I’m going to make sure J.J. doesn’t get too high on himself.”