OK, lots to unpack here. This is going to be a fucking essay.
First of all...
Slow clap. It was a clinic.
Nick Nurse made a checklist of all our flaws and methodically exploited them.
Small PG in a shooting slump who's slow/unwilling to react to traps. No organized offense or ball movement. Tendency to help off shooters. No game plan for defending pick and pops. Undersized (or slow, depending on lineups) positions 1 to 3.
Nurse took JBB's soul. You just hate to see it.
On top of all this, Nurse was probably giddy to see Love in the starting lineup. One of the many inexplicable coaching decisions of this season. Kevin can't play 33 minutes, and he DEFINITELY can't play 33 minutes against a super long and athletic team like the Raps. It was always going to be a disaster and that's how it turned out. Love is having a bad enough time playing defense even if you don't have him hard hedge all the way to the logo. Once he does that, it's over. He cannot and will not recover at all. Just the height of insanity to play him like that.
However, you just can't hide Love on D against a team like this anyway. He's almost unplayable, as the Raptors can play legit 5-out basketball. We can rage against that style all we want, but that's the league today. If you have shooters, they need to be the base for what you do on offense. They're not for the Cavs. On the contrary, really.
Here are the 3pt shooting percentages of some Cavs players in the last 5 games:
Love 41%
Lauri 39%
Okoro 59%
I hear a lot of people complain that teams are able to trap Garland because we don't have anyone on the wings to punish them by making shots. That's BS. We do have guys who are shooting very well. Yet we're not using them. Okoro (!!) has been absolutely on fire from the perimeter for a while now, and he got off three shots against the Raptors. Three. Love and Lauri are taking tough shots against hard closeouts because we never get them in pick and pops or coming off pindowns. And STILL they're making a good percentage. But Lauri only got 10 FGA'S in 36 minutes. Love, even with his customary hair trigger, only got 8 in 33 minutes. We're ignoring the players who should be taking the majority of our shots. But you can't just hand them the ball at the perimeter and expect stuff to happen. You need to run actions and move.
The Raptors know that. They looked like they were running warm up shooting drills with the way they casually moved the ball around until they found an open shooter. Boucher had an enjoyable time just setting fake screens and popping for open 3pt shots. Again and again. The way we overreact to anyone looking to drive into the paint is comical. You get beat by open 3pt shots in this league, not tough, contested fadeaway midrangers by Pascal Siakam (even though those are the shots that seem to piss of Cavs fans the most). That's a lesson I would think JBB would have learned by now.
I mentioned above that teams are getting way too comfortable trapping Garland. Well, duh. The guy has been scouted to death. The league knows he's not giving the ball up until it's too late. Fans seem to think we need "another ballhandler" there to "take off the pressure" from Darius, but that's not how you deal with traps. You do need an outlet guy nearby, sure, BUT then you take advantage by quickly moving the ball to a dude who has an opening. There should ne no dribbling at all.
We do have the personnel to move the ball like that – we saw it in the 1st half of the season. But it starts with Garland. He needs to be willing to give up the rock when he smells a trap coming.
I don't like to pile on individual players too much when the Cavs have a lot of systemic problems that start at the top, but... we just have to get more out of Cedi. We need to get something out of him. This was one of his worst games of the season, and it couldn't have come at a worse time. The same almost applies to Love, but when we decide we're not gonna help him at all to be efficient, I can't blame him too much. If you play Love, he has to be used like a specialist. JBB uses him like a jack-of-all-trades.
Stevens caused mayhem and scored a bunch because the Raps didn't give a fuck about him, but he – like the team overall – had some really demoralizing turnovers and mental mistakes as well. Still, like Lauri, he's been able to elevate his offense when he's been needed lately, and that's commendable.
Speaking of Markkanen... I guess this is as close as you can get to scoring 20 points in the NBA while not touching the ball all game. It's like a magic trick. He was the high Cavs scorer at halftime, and true to form, we totally went away from him in the 3rd. Of course the Raps also decided to take him out of the game, but that's why you have things like strategy and plays. Please use them, JBB. We need to be able to use these decisions to our advantage.
Lauri got put on an island a lot, which is a tough place to be against some of these guys. He doesn't really have the reach to bother big jumpshooters like Siakam, particularly when they're fading away. But as I said above, those are not the shots you win with in this league. It's the open 3's we should be really worried about.
Okoro needed more shots in his cozy corner. Defensively, he got exposed once again, as he usually does against these super long teams.
Really disappointed with Garland. There was never a point when it felt he was running the team. Half the time I didn't understand what the hell he was doing out there. Forcing passes, bricking shots, dribbling into trouble, stopping the ball. His game has been extremely tough to watch lately.
LeVert doesn't have the handles to play PG in the NBA. Not by a long shot.
