While the Miami Heat has won 110-87 and taken a 1-0 series lead over the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round of the NBA Playoffs, it's pretty safe to say this one was over before it began.
Not just the game.
The whole damned series.
This Heat team and, more to the point, LeBron James, are not just built to win 66 games and get into the playoffs. They're built specifically to get to the playoffs and then punch teams in their collective faces so hard their skulls rip out of their faces with the spine still attached.
LeBron has been making mincemeat of teams all season long, en route to a fourth league MVP award. And on Sunday, he showed he still very much is in wreck the ass of all who oppose him while suplexing a horse for no good reason other than because he can mode.
Scoring 27 points on just 11 shots, grabbing ten boards, and missing out on a triple-double by two assists, James was quiet thunder. And you just knew he could simply destroy the Bucks at any moment if he felt it was necessary, if things looked like they would get out of control or the lead would slip away.
Instead, he was all cold merciless Cobradick, bludgeoning the Bucks with a slow, methodical, efficient death rather than a quick thunderous kill.
James simply outmatched the entire state of Wisconsin in a maelstrom of cock-slaps and devastating dunks that left the Bucks breathless and served as a warning to all:
Shit, as it were, is about to get real.
But LeBron was not alone in littering the American Airlines Arena with decaying deer corpses and broken assholes.
Chris "Birdman" Anderson and Chris "Dinobosh" Bosh also had to get in on some face-smashing good times.
Anderson has solidified himself as a ball-wrecking harbinger of disaster that we all knew we were getting when he signed midseason. He crashed the boards, grabbed loose balls, played stifling defense, and cleaned up misses with ferocious putbacks that had the entire Heat faithful flapping their arms like a bird in unison like some absurd crazy-ass golden-eagle cult.
At no time was the Triple-A as frenzied as when the Birdman dunked.
Anderson scored ten points and grabbed seven rebounds. And the energy he brought was just what Miami needed whenever it started to play grabass with the lead and allowed the Bucks to come within two points (the Bucks never tied or led in this game).
And then there was Bosh, who brought the silky-smoove ruckus with a three-point stroke that pretty much took the Bucks' plan to use their length in the paint, ate it, shat it out, and then shot it into outer space with a T-shirt canon.
Bosh is not a three-point shooter (or so some experts would have you believe), yet there he was, knocking down treys and forcing guys like Larry Sanders to have to defend him away from the basket, thus ruining everything Milwaukee had been working on all goddamned week.
Again, whenever Bosh has had a poor outing, the naysayers are quick to call him soft. Yet he blows up ass by hitting three-pointers and going 5-for-7 for 15 points and nary a word is spoken about his unassuming face-destroying abilities.
All in all, the Heat did not play its best basketball. The team had way too many turnovers and seemed to collapse under the weight of LEBRON IS ON THE BENCH NOW. Dwyane Wade had a so-so game, which is scary because he's Dwyane Fucking Wade and Dwyane Fucking Wade doesn't have so-so playoff games for very long. Mario Chalmers and Norris Cole were a dumpster filled with homeless-person shit caught on fire. Ray Allen looked disheveled. And Shane Battier was decent only on defense. The Bucks point guards shot lights out.
Yet Miami never relinquished the lead and won by 23.
And whenever the Bucks came within striking distance of making any kind of noise, LeBron would come back into the game and unleash the Kraken.
The Bucks might make a series of this, but chances are, they won't.
And, most important, LeBron James is entering his first NBA Playoffs as a defending champion. That means he has no more ridiculous media-driven hurdles to overcome.
He simply picked up where he left off as a destroyer of everything NBA-related in a merciless cataclysm of Cobradick gore and violence.
Game 2 of the best-of-seven series is on Tuesday night at the American Airlines Arena. Tipoff is at 7:30.
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