They weren't the best team in the league. Regular season record means very little. BBallTim has often told me so. You can ask him.
The Lakers were the best team in the league. They won the championship, after all. The Celtics were also better than the Cavs.
A team getting swept three years prior in the Finals after winning a historically bad Eastern Conference doesn't merit calling them the best team in the league. Especially since the Lakers hadn't acquired Gasol and the Celtics hadn't acquired KG or Ray back in 2007.
Yup, the Celtics were better than the Cavs in 2010, even though few observers thought that was the case going into their Eastern Conference Semifinals series. I submit that a major reason that the Celtics ended up being better than the Cavs was that we had Rajon Rondo.
Would you dispute the statement that we would have had very little chance to win that series without him?
The media pundits are often wrong and I agree that the 2010 Celtics were better than the 2010 Cavs.
I don't dispute that Rondo was part of the reason why and I don't dispute that our chances to win the series without him would've been severely diminished.
I will say that the 2010 Cavs had the best player in the league, as BBallTym noted, but of the 5 best players in the series, Boston had 4. I'd like to know how many times the "best team in the league" only had 1 of the 5 best players in a given series. Please ask BBallTym to cite examples of the "best team in the league" having 1 of the top 5 players in any series (in some order, LeBron, KG, Pierce, Ray, Rondo). He has a long stretch of NBA history to work with. My guess is he has no sensible answer to that one, maybe a sarcastic, forgettable answer.