The Point Four-ward: All Eyes Ahead!

Four points I’m thinking about the Cleveland Cavaliers…

1.) After spending quite a bit of last week’s column talking about how the Cavs’ ups-and-downs have made this season a particularly rocky ride this season for their fans, I’m not sure what new to say about their latest display that had Deadspin running the headline “The Cavs Got Beat By Something Resembling the Memphis Grizzlies.”

Players and coaches can talk about looking themselves in the mirror — about respecting each and every opponent — as much as they want. You can even, if you’re Kyrie Irving, offer up this bizarre bit of rationalization (per Chris Fedor on cleveland.com):

“I just think for us, as a maturing young team, we just have to come out and play everybody the same way… For me, last day and a half I spend watching film on Mike Conley and then damn near before tipoff I find out he’s not playing and Z-Bo is not playing and our shootaround was dedicated to stopping these two guys and then we come in and the whole thing changes. We just have to get better as a team preparing for anybody that is out there on the floor. Myself included. Caught me off guard a little bit. No excuses. We should have gotten this win tonight. We didn’t. They came in and beat us.”

That’s right. Irving blamed the loss partly on not playing against the more talented players they’d prepared to face.

While Cavs fans have been waiting for this team to morph into the “hungry” and “angry” team they described themselves as back at their training camp’s Media Day, it seems more and more like this team is what they are: a talented group that, when focused, should have a chance against anyone in the league… but who are rarely focused and seem really sick and tired of playing out the regular season.

Can they turn it on come playoff time? Sure. It’s possible. But, man, it feels an awful lot like they’re looking at those of us watching them play and saying “Don’t worry. Trust us.” Which is exactly what someone says when the last thing you should ever do is trust them.

Put another way, it’s as if with five weeks left in the regular season, the Cavs have put classic Phil Collins on heavy rotation… which is a disquieting choice for an NBA locker room for many reasons.

2.) Clearly, this team’s issues start with defense. They gave up 35 and 33 points in the first quarter of the last two games. Yet, still, I find myself thinking about the team’s inability to carry any offensive flow from game to game.

Watching LeBron James hit some outside shots in Saturday’s win against the Celtics and seeing how much that seemed to open up what the Cavs could do on the offensive end made me wonder just how much the Cavs frustrating Jekyll-Hyde persona (or Team-Iso persona, if you will) has been impacted by having not just James but several key players in heavy-use lineups struggling to shoot the long ball.

As a team, the Cavs average 28.2 three-point shots per game, sixth most in the league. Of those 28.2 attempts, they’re hitting 10.2, good for fifth most, while the percentage of that clip — 35.7% — is eighth best (though it should be pointed out that only one percentage point separates teams eight through 20).

This is one season after the Cavs ranked second in the league in three-point field goals attempted with 27.5, of which they made 10.1 (third most in the league) good for 36.7% (sixth best in the NBA).

So, a year removed from making a firm commitment to frequently dialing from long distance as a way to create driving lanes for players like James and Irving, the Cavs are shooting more threes and are converting them slightly less efficiently, hitting about the same number as a year ago.

This relative consistency is a bit surprising when you think that the Cavs frequently are running lineups featuring scorers who have been suffering through career-worst shooting numbers during the 2015-16 season.

3.) Irving has struggled with his three-pointer since coming back from off-season surgery to repair a fractured kneecap. Prior to the All-Star break, Irving was hitting less than 30% on his three point shots, but was still taking over four of them a game. The good news, for Irving, at least, is that in the month of March, he’s 47.4% from deep, suggesting his shooting proficiency of old might be on its way back.

Since the All-Star break, Kevin Love has been shooting just 21.6% from three and has laid a perfectly round egg over the two games he’s played in March.

And, while James’s own struggles with his outside shot have been well documented, the clanky depths to which The King’s three-pointer has sunk is truly striking. He’s shooting 28.7% from deep this year. That’s the worst luck he’s had with the long ball in his entire career. It’s worse even than his rookie season (29%) and he’s shooting one more a game in 2015-16 than he did in 2003-04.

Given the uneven production the Cavs are getting from their Big Three, how have they been able to keep their collective head above the three point water line? They’ve done so largely because two of their other rotation players have been shooting the lights straight out.

Matthew Dellavedova is now connecting on 46.8% of his catch-and-shoot three pointers, not far off from Stephen Curry who hits 48.5% of those same shots. Add that to J.R. Smith, who weathered a cold start to the season, but now has boosted his percentage from distance to 39.9% and you get a picture of how the Cavs have been able to survive so far… but also a sense of why this team has often looked surprisingly ill-suited to run with each other. They are relying on their role players to give the sort of consistent performances (at least in this one area) that you’d expect from the stats.

For much of the season, the Cavs starting five of Irving, Smith, James, Love and the revolving center of Timofey Mozgov and Tristan Thompson has had exactly one person closer to 40% than 30% from three. That’s a line-up that is not particularly good at shooting what has become the most important shot in the professional game.

4.) It also suggests a possible reason why the Cavs often look so quickly to abandon their offensive sets in favor of isolation play. If one of the shots your offense is built on creating are open threes and you feel — and the stats back up — that some days the three falls for you and some days it’s like there’s a lid on the bucket, how does that trickle down into your desire to run the offense when the lineup you’re running with on the whole is not good at shooting some of those game-breaking shots? You probably don’t trust that shot and, if it’s open, you probably pass it up in order to go one-on-one or you feel pressed to shoot it, but you don’t do so with confidence. There’s just no patience there to keep shooting the good looks and trusting that they’ll fall.

This even explains, in part, their poor defensive effort to start games. The Cavs, from ownership all the way down to the players is impatient, everyone fully planning to be playing in the NBA Finals again this June. This has been a whole season of getting by — of looking ahead — of not looking at or facing the challenges that sit right in front of them.