The success or failure of the Cavaliers season will be judged on whether or not they win another ring. Fair or not, that’s the truth. And while there are still nine games left in the regular season, right now this doesn’t look like a team that’s capable of repeating.
On Monday night, the Cavaliers went into San Antonio and got absolutely trucked by the Spurs, 103-74. On the surface, this isn’t great – getting ran off the court by a team you may face in the Finals should you make it there is less than ideal – but this happens sometimes. If Cleveland was to just dust itself off and get back to work on Tuesday, this is nothing.
But the Cavaliers are in a really rough place right now. Since the start of March, the team is 6-9. This includes a 2-4 skid over their last six games, featuring the aforementioned loss to the Spurs and a 127-115 loss to Washington, two teams that Cleveland may need to play in the postseason.
This recent skid has led to Boston – which was pretty universally panned for not going out and acquiring Jimmy Butler or Paul George at the trade deadline in an attempt to bolster their roster before a potential playoff showdown with Cleveland – usurping the No. 1 seed in the East. As for the rest of the Top 4 of the conference, the Wizards are two games behind the Cavaliers while the Raptors are 2.5 games back, meaning there is a scenario where Cleveland heads into the postseason as the 4-seed.
While this isn’t the end of the world, having to win potential Game 7s are obviously always easier on your home court. This is especially the case when you would need to potentially do this multiple times – Cleveland’s path to defending its title is going to be difficult, but winning it while not having home court advantage at all past the first round would be brutal.
This is especially the case because the team’s defense has been atrocious over the last month. Cleveland’s defense is dead last in the league in defensive rating in March, which is insane, because we’re talking about a team that rode some killer defensive performances in last year’s postseason to a ring. Giving major minutes to Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, Deron Williams, and Kyle Korver was never the best idea from a defensive standpoint, but we’ve seen Cleveland overcome this in the past.
This year, it’s just not clicking.
Now, it’s completely plausible that the Cavaliers are basically expecting to figure things out by the time the playoffs run around, LeBron said as much after the loss to the Spurs. According to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon, LeBron had this to say about the team falling behind the Celtics in the East.
“How much does it matter to me? It matters more that we’re playing better basketball than where we’re at, and if that results in us getting the number one seed, getting the number two seed, three or whatever the hell it is, I want us to be playing better basketball. That’s what it comes down to. I’m not worried about anything. I feel like when we’re playing Cavaliers basketball, when we’re playing the type of basketball that we know we’re capable of playing, when we’re at full strength, we can start off on the road. We’ve done it before.”
You can probably assume that Cleveland is banking on the fact that they have been there before, they know what they need to figure out in the final few games of the year, and that LeBron is able to single-handedly level the playing field over the course of a seven-game series. As Rudy Tomjanovich once said, don’t underestimate the heart of a champion. The Cavs are the defending champions. Counting them out would be asinine barring some major injury issues or something.
But still, it’s fair at this point to wonder what exactly is going on in Cleveland. This does not look like a team that is going into the playoffs firing on all cylinders. Rather, it looks like the 2013-14 Pacers, which got the top seed in the East but limped to the finish line (they went 12-13 over the final 25 games of the year), then fell in the Conference Finals to the LeBron-led Heat in six games.
Those Pacers didn’t have LeBron or Irving, and the Cavaliers won’t go up against a team the caliber of the Big Three Heat at any point during its campaign to win the East, so there are some obvious differences to this comparison. Still, Cleveland has some issues to figure out. It has nine games to figure out what it needs to do to win a championship.
The good news is they know what it takes to get to that point. The bad news is that, if the last month or so is any indication, they have a long way to go.
Source: DIME on UProxx