The Golden State Warriors defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers 129-120 to return the NBA title to California on Monday after succumbing last year to a 3-1 Cavs comeback in the Finals.<\/p>\n
The X factor was Kevin Durant, who won the first championship of his illustrious career and was crowned Finals MVP, recording more than 30 points in each game of the series.<\/p>\n
Durant praised fans and the franchise for the victory during a post-game interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re champions and we did it on our own floor,” he said.<\/p>\n
After two comfortable home wins at Oracle Arena and a thriller in the Game 3 in Cleveland, the Warriors suffered its first loss of the post-season in Game 4 against a defiant title-holder on the ropes.<\/p>\n
A dominant 137-116 victory Friday, however, was not enough to discourage the 2015 champions, who had the best season in NBA history last year with 73 wins.<\/p>\n
The Warriors were back in form Monday, with Durant scoring a Finals career-high 39 points, seven rebounds and five assists. Stephen Curry added 34 points, 10 assists and six rebound after a sluggish Game 4 performance.<\/p>\n
LeBron James had a stellar Finals average of 41 points 13 rebounds and eight assists, and Kyrie Irving — the Cavs’ All-Star playmaker and one of the architects of last year’s championship — contributed 26 points and six assists. Cleveland\u2019s Big Three was not in full force with Kevin Love held to six points.<\/p>\n
In addition, the Warriors bench outscored the Cavs’ reserves 35-7, adding to Cleveland\u2019s troubles.<\/p>\nError, group does not exist! Check your syntax! (ID: 8)<\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Golden State beat Cleveland in Game 5 to take series 4-1 and win second NBA championship in three seasons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,127],"tags":[2313,77241,77177],"class_list":["post-58982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-sport","tag-cleveland-cavaliers","tag-golden-state-warriors","tag-nba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}