CLEVELAND – On his walk out of the news conference and back to his office on Wednesday night, one of the senior management team's teenage kids stopped to ask David Blatt: Did they ask you why LeBron wore the headband again?

So, the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers stood in a corridor of Quicken Loans Arena, smiled and said that, yes, someone did make mention of that to him.

"To be honest, I hadn't realized he was wearing it," Blatt said.

Yes, this was the revelatory discovery of the Cleveland Cavaliers' Game 2 revival on Wednesday night, a staged storyline of a headband that included a Jumbotron spoof on the discarded ornament. This is the surreal nature of life with the planet's best player and Northeast Ohio's prodigal son, odes to the mystical forces of a terry cloth crown atop King James that is treated as a legitimate factor for his success.

James had 33 points on 29 shots, a forceful performance in the Cavaliers' 106-91 victory over the Chicago Bulls to bring this best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinals to 1-1. James hadn't taken so many shots in a playoff game since 2009, insisting that, "I had to change my approach. We're shorthanded."

View photos LeBron James scored 33 points in the Cavaliers' Game 2 victory. (Getty Images) More

The genius of James is his ability to control everything: the game, the franchise and the narrative of his success. The Cavaliers lost Kevin Love for the season and J.R. Smith to a two-game suspension, and had an eight-day layoff before Game 1 on Monday night. And, yet, when James didn't play particularly well, he made sure to start a public discourse on his coach's pick-and-roll coverage. It worked perfectly, and the Game 1 fallout turned into an open season on Blatt – a risky play out of James given how a superstar's public evisceration of a coach's game plan can reverberate through a locker room and inspire something of a rebellious state.

"We didn't make large-scale [defensive] adjustments, we just executed better," Blatt told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday night. He has come to understand the nature of this coaching assignment, the way Erik Spoelstra had with the Miami Heat. To coach James means getting most of the blame, and a scarcity of credit. For the chance to be a champion, everyone with a whistle and a clipboard would gladly take it.

Of course, Blatt wouldn't dare articulate it that way, but most in the league understand this is all part of the blessing and curse of life with LeBron James.

When asked about the 48-hour obsession over his pick-and-roll coverages – about how a Game 1 defeat had been thrust upon him – Blatt told Yahoo Sports: "We swept our first series, and then we lost one game. I mean, Christ, give me a break. And we're missing 40 percent of our starting lineup. I mean, let's just be fair. We had the best record in the NBA since January. The best record in the NBA. That just [bleeping] happened? That came out of nowhere?"

Finally, Blatt sighed and shrugged. Here was the guy who had won the playoff game on Wednesday night.

"Ah, I'm over that [bleep], man. Hey, people can say what they want."

The Cavaliers will get Smith back for Game 3, but Love is lost. Chicago and Cleveland are settling into a long series, one that promises to get more physical, more volatile in Chicago this weekend. Desperation hangs over this Bulls franchise, and that'll start to play out in this series.

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