CLEVELAND (AP) - The championship LeBron James craves more than any other, the one he came back home to get, is four wins away.
The Cavaliers are in the NBA Finals.
James scored 23 points, Kyrie Irving returned after missing two games and Cleveland reserved a spot in the finals with a 118-88 victory Tuesday night against the Atlanta Hawks to win the Eastern Conference title.
By sweeping the top-seeded Hawks, the Cavs earned their second trip to the finals, where they will face either Golden State or Houston.
It will be the fifth straight visit to the league's showcase event for the inimitable James, who returned to Cleveland after four years in Miami to try and end this city's championship drought dating to 1964.
If he can, James will have a title that would put him in a class by himself. Other players have won more championships, but none has ever done it for his ring-starved home region.
"We have everything it takes to win," James said after the Cavs were presented with the conference trophy.
However, they've got their eyes on another one.
"Cleveland," owner Dan Gilbert said, addressing the crowd, "We're not settling for this."
Jeff Teague scored 17 and Paul Millsap 16 for Atlanta, which won a team-record 60 games during the regular season and made the conference finals for the first time since 1970. But the Hawks were no match for the Cavaliers and had no answer for James, who nearly averaged a triple-double in the four games.
J.R. Smith added 18 points and Tristan Thompson had 16 points and 11 rebounds.
It was a tough way for the Hawks to end a remarkable season. They survived a tumultuous offseason, and their young roster gelled in January when they became the first franchise to go 17-0 in a calendar month. They went on to win 19 straight, improved their record by 22 wins over last season and beat Brooklyn and Washington to make their first conference finals since 1994.
But an injury to starting forward Thabo Sefolosha in April was followed by DeMarre Carroll injuring his knee in the series opener, before Kyle Korver's season ended in Game 2 with an ankle injury.
Those all hurt, but it was James who inflicted the most pain.
James carried the Cavs to their first finals appearance in 2007, when they were swept by San Antonio. Cleveland was a heavy underdog then and it was assumed the Cavs would get back again. But James left in 2010 to join the Heat, a move that dropped the Cavaliers from relevance and into the draft lottery four straight years. But those days are over - Cleveland and King James reign supreme in the East.
The Cavs got through the last two rounds without forward Kevin Love, who sustained a season-ending shoulder injury. His arrival last summer, joining James and Irving to form a Big 3, made Cleveland the team to beat in the East.
It didn't go exactly as planned under first-year coach David Blatt.
"Were in Cleveland," Blatt cracked. "Nothing is easy here."
The Cavs lost center Anderson Varejao to a season-ending Achilles injury in December and they were 19-20 before trading for Smith, Iman Shumpert and Timofey Mozgov, a trio that transformed Cleveland.