The Point Four-ward: Backcourt Bliss

First off, if you haven’t listened to Nate, Tom and Ben’s mid-season Cavs: The Podcast, what are you waiting for??

Four points I’m thinking about the NBA and the Cleveland Cavaliers…

1.) Kyrie Irving is really winning me back over this season.

While everyone (CtB included) was quick to heap praise on the performance of newly-acquired center Timofey Mosgov in the Cavs 108-94 victory over the Chicago Bulls, Monday night, for me, was all about Irving.

It wasn’t his greatest shooting performance (7-16 for 18 points and only got to the free throw line four times) but watching Irving play surrounded by talent is to remember just the type of amazing plays he’s capable of on an every-time-down-the-floor basis. In fact — and it pains me to say this — he may have already passed LeBron James in that regard.

This is not to say that Irving is a better player than James. The Cavs recent losing streak with James out showed that, no, Irving still does not know how to win in this league. Too often, his brand of hero ball seems to send the Cavs to the wrong side of the win/loss column. He walks the ball up too much rather than pushing it. But, as we saw from Irving in the FIBA tournament this summer, when he seems to feel more trust in the players around him, Irving can look like one of the best players in the league.

Take a look at the first few plays in the video below (or, you know, watch the whole thing over and over, if you want):

Irving’s baseline drive draws the attention of three Bulls defenders, allowing him the easy dish off to Mosgov under the rim for an easy two. Then he gets a filthy block of Pau Gasol from behind. Then he advances the break with the pass to the hair-trigger of J.R. Smith for three and to James for James-standard rim finish. An Irving bucket isn’t shown until there’s just over a minute left in the first quarter (and, boy, was it a beautiful bucket).

With the Cavs full cast on the floor with him, Irving seems more willing to allow his driving to set up more opportunities for his teammates… something that has been less the case with LeISO’s 20-seconds-than-heave strategy.

Regardless, it just feels good to like watching Irving again.

2.) While the Cavaliers are feeling expectedly warm and fuzzy during their current win streak, there’s another familiar face seeing a similar upswing in the last two weeks: Dion Waiters.

In his five games since joining the Thunder, Waiters is averaging 14.4 points in just under 28 minutes a game. He has also seen some of his advanced stats, never Waiters strong suit, see a similar small sample size bump. Waiters PER in OKC is 17.6 and his WS/48 is an equally above-league-average .117. (Update: this was written before Waiters scored three points on 1-9 shooting in 26 minutes of the Thunder’s Tuesday night win over the Miami Heat, plummeting said advanced stat plumage to more familiar below-league-average numbers of a 13.7 PER and .067 WS/48… So, you know, small sample size giveth and small sample size taketh away.)

Taking a look at some of Waiters highlights shows him still taking many of the shots that drove Cavs fans nuts and, while Waiters attributes his early success with the Thunder to being able to “touch the ball” more, he’s actually touching it a touch less.

But, scoring and usage and touches aside, you wonder if Waiters played defense like he does in the play below, if he’d still be on the Cavs.

Godspeed, Dion. CtB wishes you well.

3.) Until Iman Shumpert returns (either tonight or Friday) it’s tempting to look at the trade as being a straight Waiters-for-Smith deal (rather than turning Waiters and a protected first rounder into the Shumpert/Smith/Mosgov trifecta) for the simple fact that, once he’s moved to the bench, Smith will take on the role the team tried to fill with Waiters for most of last season and this one. So, let’s do that…

Smith’s post-trade stats have actually been pretty similar to Waiters’. He’s been playing more minutes (about five more a game) but scoring 14.6 points per game compared to 12.5 for Waiters. He’s also shooting better from the floor, especially from three-point range, where Smith is shooting 39% (and where his looks shouldn’t exactly get worse now that he’ll be sharing the floor, at times, with LeBron James). The two guards have nearly identical PERs and Smith is currently besting Waiters in WS, WS/48, all while posting a lower usage rate.

The Cavs will almost surely have to deal with “bad” J.R. at some point(s) after, so far, seeing almost exclusively the good, but even rolling back some of Smith’s numbers when he loses minutes on Shumpert’s return and the Cavs still have a bench scorer who fits into what they are built to do now better than Waiters ever did.

Which is scary… because we’re still talking about J.R. Smith.

4.) Monday’s win against Chicago moved the Cavs into the number five slot in the Eastern Conference. They now sit 4.5 games behind the sputtering Bulls, 6.5 behind third place Toronto and a full seven games in back of the Wizards of Washington D.C.

Going into their recent trip out west — while being told that James would very likely return during the swing — I figured the Cavs had to go 3-3 in the five road trip games and their first game back home against the Bulls. The losing was getting ugly and I felt the team needed to find something positive to build on. I was expecting those positives to be an Irving/Love-led victory in Sacramento, a sound win against the Lake Show and then a grab bag win from either the Suns, Clippers or Bulls.

This team — as has been their calling card for the past several seasons, at least — completely confounded my attempts at prediction. The laid an egg of supreme egginess in Sacramento, but — and probably more importantly when looking at the season as a whole — they beat both the Clippers and the Bulls and had a decent shot to steal a win in Phoenix, as well. Thus far in the history of your post-trade, new-look Cavs, they are not racing out to leads and then blowing them, as they were early in the season. They haven’t stared at a ten point deficit and felt like it was 20, as they did when LeBron was injured/resting. Time will tell if they’ve finally figured out how to keep their opponents from scoring 60 points by halftime of every game, but right now the schedule is favorable (nine of 13 are at home heading into the All-Star break) and the talent (if still imperfect) on the Cavs roster is rising (if still imperfectly) to the top.

The head coach and the players have gotten some of their swagger back. By the weekend, they should be as healthy and complete a roster as they’ve had at any point this season. Now, it’s time for the team to go on a serious run and show that they’ve learned something about winning from all of the recent losing.