Cleveland Cavaliers Blog

  Solid win against a bottom feeder but tonight will be much tougher.   Player spotlight:  Jalen Brunson.  While Jalen Suggs is supposed to be the next Lowry, it is Jalen Brunson who is having a Kyle Lowery mid 20s ascension right now both production wise and stylistically.  If your first impression is that his moderate free throw rate means he doesn’t seek contact then you need to know that FTr has a flaw which devalues players like Brunson.  FTr is FTA/FGAs, so and-1s which add only 1 FTA against 1 FGA are devalued against missed shots when fouled which grant you 2 (or 3) FTs against 0 FGAs.  Jalen Brunson has been a monster at generating and-1s this year (85th percentile) and was solid last year (59th percentile).  His strength and body control allow him to finish through contact, and finish in a variety of contorting positions, and he has been 92nd percentile at finishing at the rim the past 2 seasons for guards at 72% there.  Brunso...

  The 4th quarters in this four game losing streak have been painful to watch and they have highlighted the Cavs complete lack of a star.  Too many people overuse the term star, so they invented super-star so that they could immediately overuse that word as well.  Star here is subjectively defined as someone who can impose their will on a game, and the Cavs have missed that.  They might have squeezed out a few wins during this stretch if they had just the right unavailable guys at just the right time, but that is indicative of a starless team.   Part of me is gratified that the Cavs can, while down multiple starters, force Curry to go nova in the 4th for GSW to win, or for Harden and Durant to pull out their PnR that they normally reserve for tough circumstances against better teams.  The rest of me wants to claw my eyes out when they put up 8 points in a fourth quarter or give up a 13 point lead in the 3rd.   The good: Okoro’s useful rebound...

  Back to basketball!  The Cavs not very easy, playoff team schedule continues with a second game against the Nets.  Brooklyn is a flawed but very difficult team to play against, Harden (who has regained his offensive form) and Durant are mismatches that the Cavs have no one in particular to defend against as we are once again denied the excitement of watching Evan Mobley test his defensive chops against an absolute top tier scorer in Durant.   The Cavs have been a fundamentally different offense since they lost Collin Sexton.  They currently stand at 20th in the league in 3pt attempts per game at 33.9, but that is pretty close to a hard split before and after Sexton’s injury*.  Since that injury they have averaged almost 39 attempts a game which would tie them for 6th per game across the league and the last 5 games it has been over.  Considering that Markkanen (#2 on the Cavs in 3pa/g) hasn’t played in that span and Love (#5 in 3pta/g) played 42 ...

  A week ago the Cavs were in great shape, 7-5 and going into a game against one of the worst teams in the league with hope of getting their full big man rotation back together in the near future.  Instead of reintegrating Love and Markkanen back with Mobley and Allen they started Ed Davis at center last night and are 9-7 going into a game against the best team in the league record wise.   This has some of the feel of last season, where a better than expected start was hampered by injuries, a trade and eventually the Drummond/Nance frontcourt could no longer hold the defense together in a meaningful way.  Right now it is the Garland/Rubio backcourt trying to hold the offense together and it isn’t holding out.   There are significant differences though.  Last season Love’s injury limited him to 4 games out of the first 47, while Sexton and Mobley’s injuries aren’t projected to cost them more than half of that number combined, and the backcourt was ...

  We have a home and home against Boston so naturally let’s combine the write up with the preview for Monday’s game. What is wrong with the Celtics?  Last night is far more understandable than their fans would let on, down 3 rotation pieces on a b2b coming off an OT game with travel?  Bad quarters happen in these circumstances.  However they blew a large lead vs Chicago without any of these concerns, and they haven’t played consistently strong basketball from game to game.  This isn’t a talent issue.  Robert Williams is a high value player, Brown and Tatum all-stars a year ago, Smart/Schroder/Horford are all NBA level rotation players.   Partial Answers below.  Absolute garbage fit.  Robert Williams could be their best player, but he has a team low usage mark while having a LEAGUE leading TS mark.  His usage is down 30% from last year’s rate as well, so this isn’t a maximum usage rate for his limited (but powerful) skill set. ...

  Beating Detroit doesn’t give us a lot of information, but it does answer one question- is this team going to play up/down to their opposition?  It certainly didn’t look that way against Detroit, they kept their defensive intensity up (Detroit’s 82 ortg is 16 points lower than their ortg coming into the game and even normalizing 3pt shooting it was still double digits lower) which won them the game handily.  Tonight’s game vs Boston is a larger test, but we will get to that. Takeaways since Collin’s injury:   Garland’s usage is up a bit the past two games but his 3ptar is way up.  He is averaging almost 10 attempts per 36 mins which would put him ~#12-13 so far, way up from his 6.7 which is 84th (and quite a bit lower before these games).  Almost 2/3rds of his shots (19/30) have come from 3 and he has taken only a single Free Throw, averaging 20/5.5 against 3 TOs.  Not quite a star turn but if he can add in a few drives and FTAs on top of those a...

That was an irritating loss.  The Cavs lose a 10 point lead, and fumble several times in the closing seconds (Mobley tipping a rebound out of bounds that would have gone the Cavs’ way if he didn’t touch it, Rubio missing a free throw to put them up 3 with 15 seconds to go).  Frustrating, but a quality loss.  Normalizing 3pt and FT shooting and the Cavs have a 6-10 point win on their hands.  They outright win the game if Washington shoots anything less than 88% from the Free Throw line.   Things I didn’t like first:  Starting Wade+Okoro with the obvious 3 other starters.  Wade is just useless on offense without high level shot creation near him, and Garland isn’t that level on his own.  Dean ended the game with a 3.5% usage rate, Okoro 8.6%.  Offensively the Cavs looked awful until Osman entered the game.   You need a secondary ball handler and Okoro is a long shot to be it, and certainly coming off an injury with Beal as his defensi...

  Before we preview the Cavs/Wizards game I just want to clear something up.  The Cavs are not playing ‘big’.  The national coverage has run with ‘starting 3 7 footers’ and completely failed to update with Lauri and Love out for the past 4 games.  In those 4 games the Cavs are starting their biggest lineup and Mobley/Allen are eating 100% of the center mins and only overlapping 20-22 mpg.  Yes Dean Wade is starting at SF and he is closer to a 4, he isn’t a huge SF.  Once they start splitting Mobley and Allen up their lineups have actually been quite small.  Against the Knicks once Mobley sat the lineup was Allen/Wade/Osman/Rubio/Sexton, and then Wade was pulled for Windler, shrinking it further.  The next lineup was Mobley/Osman/Windler/Rubio/Garland, not a big lineup at all.  Realistically the Cavs are cycling through big/medium/small lineups regularly with their limited options in the front court.   On to Washington.  The Wiz...

  Colin Sexton is out indefinitely.  Get well Collin. I started running through lineup options with Sexton out after the news came out but there were to many options with none of them particularly good and to many variables (is Okoro back, when will Love/LM return, will anyone else get injured, is Ricky Rubio going to start scoring 30 a game every night).   While rolling this stuff around in my head I started to get a feeling.  Now this isn’t a thought, this isn’t based on lineup data, or stats but is just a feeling.  I will say this up front, part of this feeling is just the good vibes of watching a team play surprisingly well night after night*.   That feeling?  Darius Garland is about to make his star turn.   The net value of Garland so far this season is not much better than last year’s production.  He’s added 1.5 assists a game but dropped 2 points and added a TO, and he’s down in production a fair amount from how he was f...

  I hate being a downer here, winning is great, it's fun but some winning is sustainable and some winning is not.  For forward projection purposes this win doesn’t count.  No, it’s not because Ricky drilled 8 threes, even if he missed 3 of those the Cavs are still in the game.  I’ll explain.  The Cavs are 7-4, if we use that to project forward we have a 52 win team on our hands. The Cavs have a +1.1 net rating, if we project that forward we have a 44 win team on our hands. The Cavs have played 8 road games to 3 home games if we grant a 3 point swing for home vs away that adds ~0.8 pp100 to their net rating, that pushes their expected wins to the 48-49 win range.   Do you really think this team is a 48 win squad? Or break it down by defense.  The Cavs are the 13th ranked defense in the league.  That isn’t particularly good, certainly not good enough to drive a near 50 win team in the NBA but it is nice and solid.  However the Cavs have ju...

  I feel like titling this preview ‘how the knicks will beat the Cavs’, which is funny because I was WAYYY more optimistic (yes I bet on both the Cavs over in wins and making the playoffs, so yes I actually meant it) on the Cavs than the consensus coming into the season.  Realistically how many games can the Cavs keep winning on no rest, with a short roster against expected playoff teams?  The wins themselves have been great, but they haven’t been easy and have been full-energy, whole-game wins to squeak them out.   This is also the last game like this for a while.  2 days off before a stretch of 4 home games and 8 of 9 total, although the schedule is still difficult and has a pair of b2bs.  Okoro should be back for Wednesday giving them at least some fresh legs, and Love and Markkanen should be back sometime during that first 4 game stretch.   So how are the Knicks winning games this year? The 10,000 ft level is that they have inverted last ...

I don't think I understand math anymore.  OK, we won by a single point so it was close, but nothing about that game felt close.  We got KILLED on the offensive glass.  20-11 in offensive rebounds.  That is 9 extra possessions right there.  We got KILLED in the turnover game.  18-11, that is 16 extra possessions for Toronto.  7 blocks to the Cavs 3.  To win games with that level of possession discrepancy typically you have to shoot well, but the Cavs went 10-33 vs 12-27 from 3.  When down 5 in the 4th it felt like it must be double digits.   Dylan Windler was the only Cav not to record a turnover. I need to look at a shot chart. Wow.  28 for 52 from 2.  54% from 2s.  Counting I see 4 total 2pta taken outside of the paint.  That is nuts, 48 shots inside the paint?  I count 19 Raptor shots outside of that painted area.  That really shows what nothing but 3s and shots at the rim can do.  Keep getting i...

  What the Cavs need to pull out a W tonight Allen/Mobley have to be better than Barnes/Achiuwa.    Precious is underlengthed as a C, especially against Allen.  Jarrett Allen more mobile by a good amount* and has a solid height/length advantage.  Allen has put up big games against Jokic, Adams, Plumlee and Nurkic.  Of course this isn’t all on Allen, he has big games when his guards are forcing Centers to come out on them, I can’t really fault Nurkic for Lillard/McCollum dying on screens and being caught between Garland and Allen.  FVV and Trent will be much tougher on the ball though, these two will have to create some chances themselves.  Achiuwa is struggling on offense, shooting under 40% on 2s and he has been blocked 15 times on 87 attempts (a rate that would make Collin Sexton blush).   SexLand needs to take care of the ball.  Garland has been better the last two games with 40 combined TS attempts and assists against 6 TOs but ...

  What’s that spell?  WINdler!   There are ugly wins, moral victories, bad losses etc throughout a season.  This one is hard to classify, the Cavs almost threw it away in the waning moments and needed a missed 3 to avoid overtime against a tired team trying to find their pace despite shooting 50% from 3.  On the other hand they took the W against a likely playoff team while missing 3 of their top 8 (expected, we will see) rotation guys.    The Cavs have depth!  Wade is a lesser version of Markannen, Stevens is a lesser version of Okoro.  These things don’t win you a playoff series but they get you a W or two in the regular season.  Our 9, 10 and 11 guys can actually step in and play a role that fits next to the remaining top rotation pieces. The Cavs could really struggle if Rubio goes down.  There is so much more than competence coming out of our backup PG spot.  The 2nd quarter run out was so much Rubio which is ast...

  New coach, new scheme, new leading scorer, same old Blazers.  Dame is struggling to hit shots, draw fouls, and score in general.  PP100 would be the lowest since his rookie year, TS would be by far the worst of his career and still the Blazers are #6 on offense, and #22 on defense. This isn’t a surprise, Portland has committed to 3 guard lineups with the 6’3 Powell (6’10+ wingspan) starting at the three, and the 6’4.5 Nassir Little (7’1+ wingspan) playing the three/four off the bench.  Now length can cover a multitude of sins and along with Covington (7’1+), Nurkic (7’2) and Nance (7’1+) they definitely have wingspans without massive height.  But wingspans don’t cover everything, and Portland has been below average for the past 6 seasons in 3pt% against and 20th or worse in 5 of those seasons.  There is 3pt variation against you, but there is less than a 2% chance at an average team running below average for 6 straight seasons and well under that for fini...

  4-4 is a better record than pretty much anyone expected coming off a really cramped, road and expected playoff team heavy schedule.  Not to belabor this point but I am going to run it down a little bit.  The Cavs have played 8 games this season so far, tied for the most and three more than the Suns who are still at 5 total games.  With six road games the Cavs have played more road games than the Suns have total games, and the Cavs have not yet played any expected bottom feeders in the league.  Lets do a little compare and contrast with a team that has exceeded expectations in the East, the Bulls. Chicago through 7 games has 4 home and 3 away, a small edge.  That single game is one less back 2 back and one more rest day.  Schedule wise they have played 4 games against teams in the bottom 6 in net rating (2 Det, NOP and Bos).  They have absolutely taken care of business against those teams, and also have a nice win against Utah at home, and a tigh...