I was never a top level athlete but I don't remember spending much time while i was waiting around for a week to play my next game about letting that one go so I could play the same guys three days later and try hard then. The minutes also tell the story in this regard.. Love 37, Bron 41 Irving 38 vs Curry 36 Green 40 thompson 24.
BTW in your four series with the 3-1 stat .. how many series did the home team win?
To answer your question: all 4 home teams won game 2 & all 4 won the finals (the '96 Bulls, the '00 & '02 Lakers, and the '13 Heat).
The notion of NBA teams 'taking games lightly'/'not trying hard' is hardly novel, even for playoff games. The Cavs gave nothing like their all in game 3 in Toronto, as a recent immediately-comes-to-mind example (ftr Bron played 39 mins in that game, Irving 38, Love only 30 but he was having a shocker so...). But they certainly tried hard in game 6 at the same venue.
A more distant series I still vividly recall that speaks rather more emphatically to this issue are the 04-05 finals between San Antonio & Detroit. SA were absolute garbage in games 3 & 4 (losses by 17 & 31 pts), in no way, shape or form resembling the slick outfit who had comfortably gone up 2-0 at home (wins by 15 & 21 pts). But once the series was tied and SA faced falling behind in the series for the first time (this was still with the old 2-3-2 format), their competitiveness magically reappeared and they won a monumentally tight game 5 in OT (no team won a regulation period by more than 2 pts, and the game itself was decided by 1 pt; the lead changed 12 times & the game was tied on 18 occasions), one of the best games I've ever watched. How SA went from not being able to win a solitary period on the way to losing by 30+ pts in game 4, to winning that monumentally tight affair at the same venue a few days later with no significant personal changes or injuries affecting either team, speaks directly to the fact that teams take finals games lightly/off. And that Detroit then won game 6 by 9 pts itself made a mockery of their limp efforts in their own initial road games: their propensity to deliver such an intensive road effort existed on every occasion they took to the Spurs floor, but the only time they performed at that venue involved their season ending if they didn't. But of course winning 2 straight at San An proved to be a bridge too far for them, and they lost game 7 (though that was tied w/10 min to go, so again their effort far exceeded anything they showed in the first 2 games).
Maybe because it's the finals someone might find it hard/er to believe a team would take any game lightly. I'm not one of those people. There's little doubt game 2's result will provide a sharper context with which to understand game 1. Right now I'm not sold on the prognosis that that's all the Cavs have to offer. It would be like reading into the game 1 (& 2) result(s) from the 04-05 finals that Detroit simply couldn't live with SA, and that that series was going to go close to being a sweep (just ftr, Detroit led at one point in the 3rd period of their game 1, just like the Cavs did last night). No matter how well someone thought Detroit matched up to San An for those 04-05 finals, their expectations were palpably crushed by the results of those first 2 games. Nothing about them said SA was going to have any difficulty winning that series going forward. Then along came game 3.
