The Point Four-ward: Fix It!

Four points I’m thinking about the Cleveland Cavaliers…

1.) The final score of Monday night’s game — 105-99 — was very close to what I predicted the outcome would be. In my hypothetical running, though, I had the Cavs coming out the victor, if only narrowly so, and the Raptors forced to lick their wounds and search for answers following a close, hard fought loss. I pretty much nailed it… except for the actual winner and loser of the game. The size 15 Nike was on the other foot, as they say, with Toronto outlasting a Cavs team all used up from having to come back from 18 points down.

For those of you wishing the Cavs would face some adversity to prove their mettle… well, this is it. The wine and gold have a series on their hands.

Has Toronto just benefited from some home cooking, feeding off the energy of their raucous home crowd, or has Kyle Lowry actually rediscovered his All-Star form, one that, this time, will travel with him to Cleveland? Until tip-off on Wednesday night, the answer you get will depend on who you ask. No doubt, Raptors fans are salivating at the possibility of seeing Lowry, DeMar DeRozan and Bismack Biyombo wreak the same kind of havoc at The Q that they’ve managed at The Centre, while Cavs fans, fresh off of watching their team look unbeatable for the better part of a month, are left to console themselves with thoughts of “The Cavs could have won Game 3 if…”

Perhaps the only thing Cavs fans and Raptors fans can agree on right now is that the officiating has become an unfortunately large part in the story of this series. Toronto fans have been irate about what LeBron James, in their eyes, gets away with. Cavs fans have been scratching their heads after shots to LeBron’s crown haven’t been treated as seriously as they feel they should. Raptors head coach Dwane Casey even received a $25,000 fine following comments he made about the officials after Game 2 and the Raptors were helped in Game 4 by a late no-call on Lowry as he corralled the ball from James.

2.) The point of this is not to blame the peaks and valleys of this series on the refs. The fact is that both teams have benefited from things the officials have… let’s just say “seen differently” than what’s made clear in slow motion replay. When most of Jeff Van Gundy’s and Mark Jackson‘s air-time is spent arguing the validity of foul calls (and non-calls), however, which it seemed to be on Monday night, that’s a problem.

That problem might be that the league, in their continuing efforts to “get it right,” now spends too much time reviewing calls.

Too much time away from game action means dead air to fill, both on the broadcast and in the arena, dead air filled with the incessant review of the play in question. The home crowd will let the refs know when they disagree with a call, which got taken to its unfortunate (but not unexpected ) end when the game was delayed even more as arena security escorted one overly critical fan out following a disputed call late in the game.

On the broadcast, Van Gundy and Jackson review the play and usually — as is the case in any good pairing of contrasting personalities in a broadcast booth — take opposing sides in the argument. This kind of argument rarely clarifies anything. Again, depending on your side, you probably see what you want to see. Only now, it’s no longer James or Lowry at the center of your partisan wrath. It’s the questions of whether or not some referee “blew it.”

I’m sympathetic to the refs, who are tasked with catching in very fast real time what the rest of us get to criticize after seeing played out with the benefit of zoom and slo-mo. I also understand the league wanting to make sure that the game is officiated as correctly as possible. It just seems like, too often, the pressure to make sure a play is called correctly actually pushes those calls further into the spotlight and threatens to turn the story of a handful of calls into the story of the game.

3.) Nba.com has a batch of stats they call “hustle stats” which are meant to gauge… well, you guessed it. It turns out that many of these stats did not reflect well on the Cavs for Game 4.

The two most lopsided hustle stats against the Cavs Monday night were “screen assists,” which is when a player sets a screen for a teammate that directly leads to that teammate scoring, and “deflections,” in which the defensive player gets his hand on the ball not during the course of a shot attempt.

For the game, the Cavs only had three screen assists (two for Tristan Thompson and one for James), compared to 14 for the Raptors. They also only had three deflections, while the Raptors had 12.

The lack of screen assists makes some sense. A lot of what their success had more to do with ball movement around the perimeter — along with some Richard Jefferson fourth quarter back door cuts — while the Raptors use a lot of screens to free up Lowry’s attacks and DeRozan’s mid-range game. Also, the Cavs have a starting point guard (Irving) who doesn’t always properly use the screens he’s given (but that is why Thompson leads the team in this category).

The deflections are a more glaring illustration of the disparity in aggressiveness between the Raptors and the Cavs. The Cavs only had ten turnovers for the game, while the Raptors had eight, but it shows that the Raptors were being disruptive, even when they weren’t necessarily picking off passes. Had the Cavs used some of their gas to muster some defensive umph in the second quarter, rather than let the Raptors shoot 59% from from the floor on their way to a lead that required the Cavs to burn hot until they hit empty late in the game… if they let defense and hustle sustain them when their threes weren’t falling, they’d likely be looking at a 3-1 series lead right now.

4.) Finally, as Cavs fans struggle to find answers for two games that have seen their team tumble from talk of a 16-0 playoff run to suddenly looking vulnerable against the Raptors, the simplest course of action is often the most easily overlooked, as I was reminded Tuesday morning by Scott Henkle:

https://youtu.be/sKFRSL4wpcY