The Cleveland Cavaliers finished the regular season with 64 victories, the most efficient offensive in the NBA, and the defensive player and the year coach. They entered the playoffs like a clean buzzing saw, passing through the heat of Miami in four games with their entire depth, their balance, their physique and their zip. All this was not relevant Sunday evening, however, in one of the most disparaged and pitiful performances that you will never see in a seeded in a eliminatory match.
Against a sparkling team from the Indiana Pacers who apparently done each blow, nailed each adjustment and executed with an implacable intention, the riders lost 129-109. The final score does not do justice to domination: Tristan Thompson played the whole fourth quarter; Nothing could be more devastating than that (except perhaps everything that happened at the end of match 2).
Cavaliers, now down 3-1, can either win Tuesday evening or spend the whole summer to hear old suspicions resurfaces about their hearts. Is the starting rear area too small? Can they generate enough spacing when Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen share the court? Can the ethical system that transported them through 82 games will translate against an opponent who has enough discipline to go bankrupt their favorite plans?
Some of these questions are premature or somewhat unjust. Darius Garland, Mobley and’Andre Hunter are still not 100% after missing a time earlier in the series; Donovan Mitchell’s ankle can mark him for match 5; A catastrophic loss does not define a season, especially when it comes to a team that has demonstrated a hardening shot 80 points First half, as the Pacers did. But Shot Making tells never tells the whole story; Even if the riders force a match 6 (which is always entirely possible!), What happened during this unbalanced Fackplant was partly a function of their own structural shortcomings.
Let’s start with a joyful defense that Indiana ruthlessly exploited the jump. The Pacers knew what was going to happen and was deliberate to find the discrepancies they wanted to attack. At the beginning, it meant that the Big Max Strus went to:
Indy was precise. He looked for ideal angles to make entry passes and undertook to impose his will inside, punishing in size instead of speed. Finally, the Pacers also took advantage of Garland, which is a weak link during a good day and the road with a bad toe. On scrambles, whether reversals or an offensive rebound, the Pacers have been wasted with any opportunity to find it:
Indiana was also patient. After his initial pick-and-roll which is not going out in the clip below, Andrew Nembhard turns the ball at Myles Turner, recovers it and performs another pick-and-roll that the riders change (because they do not want to imply a third defender and abandon their 84th 3 in the neighborhood) ::
It took approximately half-whom for the riders to rotate themselves against a pick-and-roll in Tyrese Haliburton, with Allen in the cover instead of falling or changing. Not that it counted. The defense of the point of attack of Cleveland was abysmal, it doesn’t matter what she tried. His ball pressure was soft, his consciousness was low and the rotations were slow, if they occurred. The CAVs allowed online driving blood without resistance and when they directed the shooters of the line, the aid did not exist:
“They dominated with their strength,” said horsemen coach Kenny Atkinson, after watching his team exceed 30-6 in painting before half-time. “They raised their game to another level and we didn’t match it.”
The riders succeeded with their 3-2 zone in match 3 (a reminder to something that JB Bickerstaff installed and deployed regularly during the recruit season of Mobley), but it is impossible to set up regularly when your attack is making unl forced errors and pass-time turnover (the Pacers scored 23 Cleveland driving points in the first hour).
As coarse, huge and versatile as horsemen can be in defense, their identity is based on the other end, where they could not take off. By generating a horrible 78 points by 100 possessions in the first half, Cleveland looked in a way angry And lethargic. The movement of the ball has disappeared, replaced by unnecessarily rapid shots and curious decisions.
The Cavs went a little to Haliburton, but abandoned the strategy very early when decent looks did not give great results. In a desperate search for an appropriate spacing, Atkinson played Ty Jerome, Garland and Sam Merrill at the same time, a trio which succeeded in very limited minutes during the regular season but which barely played together in these qualifying series.
They were not an ideal combination in match 4, especially with Jérôme continuing to look like a total shell of the player that he was all year round. Normally, a confident hard -making manufacturer on the bench of Cleveland, Jérôme transmitted quality looks, made terrible decisions of a living dribbling and could not stop appearing disoriented. However, unusually poor, shooting outside for Cavs is not exclusive to Jérôme in these qualifying series.
After failing during the regular season as the most precise team of the league on the 3S wide open (they resulted in 42% of them), the horsemen suffered from a period of poorly timed drought. They were only 5 out of 19 in the first half before emptying the bench in the second. Before match 4, Cleveland had only made 35% of its 35th birthday – good for the second largest drop given by any team of these series.
There are a myriad of ways to win a match when outdoor shots do not fall to the pace to which a team is used to, but most of them go out the window if this team will make inexplicable turnover against a team that cooks and eats on the open floor. The Pacers also kept Cleveland far from the offensive glass, dominating the possession game up to 23 attempts of more goals on the field than the rider. (The summit of the previous season of Indy was plus 21, on January 2 in a victory against the Heat.)
It’s ugly, but the series is technically not over. It is difficult to imagine that Cleveland is also carefree with the ball at home in a Win-Or-Home match.
If they do not remove it and do not end their season by winning only five eliminatory games in total, it will be one of the most disappointing projections of recent memory, for a team that is built to win everything at this moment and has a very expensive mass of pay that descends the pike. It is too early to speculate on the changes that will be made, or how much this organization will blame a bad chance linked to health after spending the whole regular season to manage the minutes of each, to look into their depth, and to always erase all the teams that were held in front of it. Garland is 25 years old and Mobley is 23 years old. The two always improve; If they had been healthy for this series, there is a very good chance that it is attached or leaning in favor of Cleveland. But one more loss can trigger real questions, especially if it takes the same impassive form as play 4 had.
How will Cleveland react? And if the answer is, once again, “with extreme humiliation”, what does it mean for an offseason which, hardly, thought of being silent? Even if there are rational explanations with the collapse of Cleveland, the NBA is no longer and no longer a place to go for a decision -making, especially when high expectations are intercepted by a surprising fiasco.
Michael Pina
Michael Pina is a main editor at La Ringer which covers the NBA.
