Live Thread: Hawks @ Cavaliers (Game One)
2016-05-02
The Cleveland Cavaliers return to the floor Monday night in “The Q” looking to stay unbeaten in these young 2016 Playoffs. After taking care of the Detroit Pistons in four semi-contested games, the Cavaliers took the week to refine their games, get some rest and generally hangout.
The Atlanta Hawks didn’t have that luxury only having a few days to regroup after closing out the pesky Celtics. The Hawks battled Boston as a team, combining strong defensive stretches with streak scoring from a variety of players to take the first round series in six games. The team had a block party, netting nearly nine blocks per game to go along with eight steals. Boston played inspired basketball, but ultimately lacked the outside shooting to overcome the Hawks defensive swarm.
Jeff Teague tweaked his ankle in the Boston series but is seemingly healthy to begin Round 2. Both teams hope to avoid the injury issues that plagued them during the 2015 Playoffs. Rarely has a rematch felt so little like one. Going into last year’s Conference Finals, many truly believed the 60 win Hawks to be the better team. Kevin Love’s injury in Round One, and Kyrie’s knee trouble did provide more ammunition to those who supported the one-seed. But the Cavs played bully-ball to sweep the Hawks, pounding the glass and taking advantage of Atlanta’s fallen players.
This year, Cleveland is the clear favorite. The Cavaliers are healthy and humming under Tyronn Lue and LeBron James’ leadership. Check out our podcast extravaganza to hear more about this series’ specific matchups and other news around the league. Sound off.
Lebron had 3 guys pounding him… Smh
Turnovers!!! Self inflicted
KYRIE!!!!!
Kyrie with a cool quick move. rewarded to FT.
JR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Left Milsap open
Looks like the Cavs all got haircuts
These guys again??? Boooo Why can’t we vote on who we want to announce?
Yep, Delly needs to eliminate his one turnover tonight. That’s definitely going to be Lue’s No. 1 priority as he preps the team for Game 2!
Tom’s Insta-Cap is up!
Spurs ISO ball won’t survive against these Cavs.
Are you saying the Cavs can “out-ISO” the Spurs?
I really think we beat the Spurs
Man. Cavs have looked so good these playoffs.
WILL GET YOU SOME “PIX “—TOTALLY AWESOME–( IT IS THE TALK OF THIS SMALL FARMING COMMUNITY ) ” GAWKERS AND TALKERS “—-BAZEMORE IN POST GAME INTERVIEW SAID THEY PRETTY MUCH HELD LEBRON IN CHECK —GOOD KEEP ON ” HOLDING HIM IN CHECK ” AND SERIES WILL BE OVER IN 4 !!
Freaking Blazemore… It always amazes me how scrubs always love popping off over how well they “defend” LeBron… I mean, has Kahwi ever bragged about that? No, he just does it… STFU Kent… nobody cares but your mama…
Yeah. Leonard held LeBron to 28 ppg 11 rebounds and 5 assists on 63% TS. He was toasted by LeBron last time they met.
Spirs play tons of ISO ball.
Spirs won’t get these easy shots verse the Cavs.
WHEN THE HOPS ARE READY —-YOU ARE ALL(IN )VITED !!!
Sounds fabulous!!
JUST GOT IN FROM ” HOP LAND ” ( GOING TO PLANT TOMORROW ) SO HANG IN THERE COLS BREW WILL BE FLOWING ( ACTUALLY IT TAKES 3 YRS INTITIALLY FOR HOPS TO MATURE )—–ALL I HAD TO LOOK AT WAS 1 STAT OUR ” MAGICAL 23 ” ( ASSISTS ) AUTOMATIC WIN BABY ——AM SOMEWHAT CONCERNED ABOUT THE MINUTES— BUT WE DO HAVE MORE REST IN THE PLAYOFFS TO RECOVER —-GOOD WIN –3 MORE AND REST SOME MORE !!
We need some pix from Hop Land soon NOMAD!
What kinds of hops you growing?
I just made 3 straight free throws.
On NBA 2K or in your driveway?
Driveway.
Wow John Bon Jovi on that DirectTV commercial looking ROUGH. Men should not get plastic surgery.
LeBron gets less calls than any other superstar NBA player.
fewer
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/less-versus-fewer
This isn’t LGT. No one cares.
For once I agree.
Other than Shaq, I agree.
As much as it pissed me off, that comeback by Atlanta will probably be a good thing. Will force the Cavs to be sharper next game than a blowout would have made them.
I alwas hope so but then the come out and still have lapses in future games, they are inconsistent. When was the last time Cavs played a solid 48 minutes on both ends ?
They’ve won 5 straight playoff games.
playing like tonight’s game, would they win 4 games against Warriors or Spurs ? No
They wouldn’t relax against those teams.
Why did it make you so mad? They still blew them away.
Cause they were playing like ****?
Delly had a terrible game. Irving, Love, JR, and LeBron were awesome.
Did you just copy and paste that from a past thread?
lmaooo
Cavs played poorly. Love was not focused. Atlanta has no chance, yet Cavs played down to their level.
Need better execution, and mental focus. Hopefully it was just some rust they needed to knock off.
They won by eleven, and it wasn’t even that close.
It was that close until the last two minutes…
Is that why the starters had to play 40 plus minutes?
Well, when Lue is exhausting the starters, yes.
Yeah, I agree he has relied on them too much.
I still think the main issue is them relaxing, playing inefficient slowdown offense for stretches and generally relying too much on individuals like James or Irving to create something out of nothing instead of moving bodies off ball and setting back screens for cutters/shooters. More off ball movement and cutting and screens please.
Also closing out on shooters and cutting off dribble penetration throughout the game would help.
Yeah, they got very lucky that Atlanta went cold and that it let the Cavs regroup. That two offensive rebound possession that ended in a LeBron And1 won the game.
Ty Lue says that KLove was just cramping up, and that he saw him in the locker room and he’s fine…
That is good news.
Spurs look slow and old
They didn’t on Saturday…
I love that whenever these games get close the Cavs can just go ok time to win and win by 14 or whatever.
Yeah… 11 or whatever…
Pretty easy win for the Cavs.
It could’ve/should’ve been an easy win… Cavs made it way tougher than it needed to be by not choking the Hawks out in the third after they had them down 18…
Eh, they relaxed a little and schroder went nutso. It’s fine. I give the Hawks credit for playing still. Houston would’ve packed it in. They ended up winning by a ton.
Blowing an 18 point lead is a little more relaxing than I think we’d like… It was their D that put the game away in the end, but they could have stopped them a lot earlier and had a laugher of a fourth…
Yep. But that’s OK, it ended up being a laugher anyways. Just had to clamp down on Schroder. Irving played some fantastic defense down the strecht
I wasn’t laughing… I agree both LBJ and Kyrie played good D down the stretch, but Kyrie definitely had some lapses in the third on D… They probably just got to comfortable after LBJ’s slam put them up 18, but they just need to be a bit more focused than that…
but was utter garbage from the middle of the third till about six minutes left in the fourth
Guys generally start making 3s in the nba when you give them more than 5 seconds to shoot them. Look at Detroit’s .376 3pt percentage against us. Their regular season average was 34%. It is good Atlanta missed about a dozen wide wide open 3s in the first half and we went nuts and made about half our Contested threes.
Is it weird of me to want OKC just to roll over and die so the spurs are completely rested for the warriors and subsequently if not win, drain the life out gs during the western conference finals?
Not weird at all…
Cannot help but think the scoring droughts this team incurs due to the walk it up, get into offense with 14 seconds to go, and subsequently chuck a contested three off a skip pass or iso jumper is leading to bleeding leads and more minutes for starters. The “prevent offense” just leads to having no time to run a play which subsequently results in poorer shots. The poor quality shots lead to scoring droughts which result in leads never being safe with this team.
Nope. Irving went cold and the team relaxed when they went up a bunch. But once the game got serious the Cavs turned it up again and blew them away.
One out of five guys going cold should not completely shut down an offense. If it does, they are doing it wrong.
Great win. Important to stay on top and not give in to the Hawks. Big plays by the starters down the stretch. Phew!
What’s Moz looking at?
I think he’s impressed by dahntay jones’s ability to spray flames forth from his fist.
Korver only took one shot. His only points came on the free throws when Shump played dominoes with Milsap.
that’s big, but now we just need to shut down dennis and bazemore under 20 points together for da other games and we good. Bazemore was 3-10 and Dennis 5-10 from 3. That wont happen again
Yeah, baze and dennis were a combined 19% from three in the playoffs coming into this game (or at least that’s the graphic I remembered…)
24 assists for the night is solid but we could have been near 30 if JR was on and Lebron didn’t chuck a few
This feels like the first game of the Piston series where the Cavs needed to step up their game a few notches to beat a hungry opponent.
Iron sharpens iron ;)
if Love banged up I’d play him little game 2 and ride with Frye and RJ bit more….cant think the officiating will be as bad for Game 2 as it was tonite…also don’t think Shroeder goes nuts again..Bazemore will get his points from hustle and Millsap as well…Teague and Horford stink
If in doubt about Love’s health, let him sit the next game. Gotta think big picture.