When it comes to predicting a winner for the NBA Finals, I’m going with emotion and the homer pick.

And that’s not the Golden State Warriors, although so many folks in Hawaii are either longtime or bandwagon-jumping fans of the Bay Area bombers.

No, the closer connection to the islands is more than 4,500 miles from here, in Cleveland.

University of Hawaii fans will remember Phil Handy as a member of the second UH team and first in 22 years to make it to the NCAA Tournament, in 1994.

It’s also the Rainbows basketball roster that produced the most NBA connections.

Trevor Ruffin played two seasons, with Phoenix and Philadelphia. Jarinn Akana was an assistant coach who is now a player agent representing, among others, New Orleans Pelicans star DeMarcus Cousins. And now Handy is an assistant coach with the defending champion Cavaliers.

Handy was credited with lighting a fire under the Cavs with a blistering speech after they lost the first two games of last year’s Finals to the Warriors.

The thing with speeches like that is that they are made often, but we usually only hear about them when they work — and these days they don’t work as often as they used to when athletes had less leverage and entitlement and coaches had more power. That kind of thing is especially risky in the NBA, the pro league where star players are most powerful. Hey, LeBron James had the juice to get Cleveland’s head coach fired; you’d think an assistant like Handy would be even more expendable.

But it worked. And part of why it did is Handy had built a reputation as a player’s coach, going back to when he started out as an individual trainer following his pro playing career in mostly overseas leagues. Calling people out — especially elite talented professionals — only has a chance of succeeding if you’ve got some cred.

“A lot of anger. A lot of frustration. A lot of curse words,” Handy told the Star-Advertiser’s Brian McInnis of the speech. “Just really from the heart, man, because our team was too talented to play the way we were playing and not really fight, the fight we had in us.”

The Cavaliers will need more than fire and brimstone speeches to successfully defend their title, since Golden State — which has lost one fewer game than Cleveland in the playoffs to this point: zero — added the second-best player in the NBA, Kevin Durant, to its already star-studded lineup. Fortunately for the Cavs, they have the best player in James.

And, perhaps the long layoff before Game 1 on Thursday after the Warriors swept the Spurs and the Cavaliers beat the Celtics in five works in Cleveland’s favor. It should in regard to Handy, with his real strength being daily one-on-one work with players in preparation for competition.

Handy is connected to the Bay Area, too, because it is where he’s from. Some Golden State fans are aware that the guy who fired up the Cavs last year was born in Oakland and raised in Union City, growing up cheering for the Warriors during the Run TMC days. But most don’t know, or don’t really care.

Former Hawaii News Now sports director Mark Carpenter, born and raised here but now working at San Francisco’s KRON-TV, said most Bay Area sports fans have less of an affinity for their homegrown sports figures who go pro elsewhere. (It’s partly a function of Hawaii not having pro teams that we will always “claim” a Marcus Mariota, while Bay Area media doesn’t identify, for example, Tom Brady very often as a product of their market or show Patriots highlights because that’s the team for which he plays quarterback.)

“It’s so Warriors-obsessed and people love drinking the Kool-Aid with this team,” Carpenter said. “As for the Cavs, they’re interested in LeBron and Kyrie (Irving), and that’s it. When it comes to talking about the coaching staff, none, not even in Phil Handy, a guy from here.

“What’s happened is there’s still a lot of torture lingering from last year, and the fact that the Cavs ruined the 73-win season,” Carpenter said. “Their thought seems to be, ‘Even though we have Durant, anything can happen.’”

Yes, anything can happen.

Coaching can even matter in the NBA sometimes, like it did last year when Phil Handy gave the Cavaliers the timely tongue lashing they needed.