So, of course, that's not how the game ended as De'Aaron Fox fired the ball from the far baseline to Harrison Barnes, who turned and fired a three-pointer that beat the buzzer and lifted Sacramento to a 100-98 victory.
Collin Sexton led Cleveland with 26 points in his return after missing the previous two games with a sore hamstring with Darius Garland scoring 18 points with Larry Nance Jr adding 17 to lead Cleveland, who played only eight players in a strangely bizarre game.
The Cavaliers will visit the Utah Jazz on Monday in the final contest of their four-game road trip.
Swashbucklings
1) Wow.
Where do I start?
The final play brings questions from me.
The first is why did the Cavaliers put no one on the passer at the baseline to make De'Aaron Fox work to throw the ball over a defender, perhaps forcing the pass to have a little more arc from the ball or cost some accuracy?
Instead, Fox got a good look at where he needed to go and put the ball on the money.
2) Then with Fox lined up on his right, the closest player to him for a player to have a legitimate shot is Harrison Barnes, who's being guarded by Dean Wade?
Collin Sexton does rush over to try to help, but you see Sexton shy away from Barnes to keep the referee from calling a foul, but that essentially means that Barnes isn't dealing with a double team and Wade barely gets off the floor to contest the shot.
Lots of blame to spread around here.
3) The loss takes the shine off an effort that surprised on the second end of a back to back set and played without Jarrett Allen, who missed the game after Dusty Rhodes hit him with a bionic elbow against the Lakers (OK, it wasn't quite that bad) and with newcomer Isaiah Hartenstein arriving too late to go through a walk-through, Cleveland would play Larry Nance Jr as the only player that could post up inside or protect the rim defensively.
4) J.B. Bickerstaff played only eight players and Cedi Osman and Dylan Windler did not play with the box score notating as "Coaches Decision".
No word on why neither would appear in the game.
5) Those decisions placed recently signed rookie Broderic Thomas from Division II Truman State into the starting lineup for the first time in his short NBA career.
Thomas would score seven points in thirty-one minutes, shooting two of eight from the field.
6) Sacramento wore their "City" Uniforms in the win.
I surprisingly liked the black with light blue lettering, but I really don't like the player name on the back of the jersey below the number.
That's how the old Kansas City Kings placed player names on their jerseys and I didn't care for it then.
7) I watched the game on the Sacramento feed as I did when the Kings visited Cleveland last week after hearing that the Kings feed was going to give the male announcers the evening off.
I found the "all-female" concept interesting, I really liked the work of Kayte Hunter in the studio from the first game, and with Hunter, a former WNBA player, moving into the analyst role for the evening I decided to give the ladies a try.
I thought Hunter was a standout and Krista Blunk was good on play-by-play as well.
Blunk works for the Pac 12 network and has called WNBA games at times in the past.
Because of the NBA League Pass decision to show loud highlights from the league at halftime rather than keep the viewer with the game network, I didn't have the opportunity to watch the other broadcasters during the game other than an occasional few seconds during a game break.
Had the network not drummed it constantly that it was a special night, the quality was good enough that I might not have known that it was a theme evening- and that shows the commentators were quite good on the evening.
Photo by Kelley L Cox - USA TODAY Sports
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