“Ya’ll came in, ‘It still smells like champagne up in here’ we never forgot that” – Mo Williams on how the Dubs provoked the Cavs in 2016 originally appeared on Basketball Network.
For many, the Cleveland Cavaliers‘ historic 3-1 comeback in the 2016 NBA Finals would have never happened had Draymond Green not been suspended for Game 5. And while Mo Williams, who was in his last NBA campaign and made 13 appearances in the playoffs that year, agrees with that notion, he also recently revealed another lesser-known reason why his Cavs team was determined to take down the Golden State Warriors in that campaign.
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Interestingly, that motivation didn’t stem from their 2015 Finals loss but rather an incident that occurred during the 2015-16 regular season itself.
Mo on how the Dubs got on the Cavs’ bad side
The 2015 NBA Finals were a gut-wrenching experience for the Cavaliers. With Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love out due to injuries, the entire pressure to lead the franchise to glory fell on LeBron James. Despite Bron averaging 29.7 points and 11.3 rebounds per night, that series was closed out in six games, meaning that the Dubs lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy on the Cavs’ home court.
So, naturally, when the two teams were scheduled to battle it out on Christmas Day, it was expected to be a feisty contest between healthy superstars of both teams. And with Steve Kerr’s team walking out with a nail-biting 89-83 victory, it seemed like a regular contest between two legitimate title contenders.
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However, that wasn’t the entire picture. As Williams revealed during his appearance on The Draymond Green Show, the Warriors tried deliberately getting under the skin of the Cavaliers before the Christmas Day game. Not only did they trash-talk, but the constant digs and snarky remarks left Cleveland’s players with a distaste.
“The motivation we got going back for Game 6 was going back home, we remembered Christmas, we played on Christmas that year,” the one-time All-Star told Draymond. “Y’all came in here talking about ‘It still smells like champagne up in here.’ We never forgot that.”
The Cavaliers did indeed make the Warriors pay
What made Cleveland’s triumph even more remarkable was the fact that they overcame the odds after not having a home-court advantage. They won Games 5 and 7 in the Chase Center against a team that had lost in the arena merely twice throughout the regular season. So, just like Golden State had their best moment on the Cavs’ home court in 2015, LeBron, Williams & Co. returned the favor a year later — perhaps in such a fashion that the Dubs players and their fans will never be able to forget.
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If the Warriors hadn’t poked the bear and mocked the Cavaliers in such a disrespectful way, maybe the hunger to get back at them wouldn’t have burned so deeply. And perhaps the 2015-16 Dubs team could have gone down in history not as the team that blew a 3-1 lead but as the greatest of all time — going 73-9 in the regular season and becoming the NBA champions to cap it off. Instead, we remember the 2016 Cavs championships as one of the most improbable and exciting underdog stories in the history of the NBA.
This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jun 16, 2025, where it first appeared.