Overview: After a dominant 40-21 first quarter, the Cavaliers cruised to a victory in a game much less competitive than the final score would indicate.
Cavs-Related Bullets:
Well, that was easy. I don’t know what it is about The Garden, but LeBron came out and put the Knicks away right out of the gate. I don’t think LeBron has taken as many bad shots combined over the rest of the season as he did tonight, but he was making absolutely everything. It was freakish. And when he wasn’t hitting a jumper, he was making a beautiful home-run pass. Normally, LeBron going for jumpers early in the game kills the offensive flow, even when he’s making them, but tonight he was so dominant in the first quarter the rest of the game hardly mattered.
After the first quarter, the game was over, and the Cavs played like it. Too many bad shots, very few well-executed sets, lots of sloppy play leading to turnovers. Didn’t really matter. It still hasn’t fully sunk in that the Cavs were playing an NBA team tonight. This Knicks team is one of the worst teams I’ve ever seen play in the NBA. It’s hard to even give out praise in this one-it honestly felt like a Globetrotter game.
+19 for Zydrunas Ilgauskas and +15 for Delonte West, despite the fact neither of them had great shooting nights-the lineup that won 66 games works. Who would’ve thunk it?
Hickson as a show starter-interesting. He had some nice plays, and Andy sure did look fantastic coming off the bench. We’ll see if MB plans to stick with this plan against a real defense and evaluate it then.
Only 19 minutes for Shaq, and no “twin towers” tonight. MB playing matchups. Again, was this rocket science?
That’s honestly all I really have for now. In all seriousness, this Knicks team is so bad it’s hard to draw real conclusions. The Cavs weren’t even running real sets, and they had their easiest game of the year. Happy weekend, all.
I wish lebron could learn to focus like he does at MSG, every night. When lebron takes long/guarded threes/twos, I usually yell at him through the tv whether he makes it or not. When he does at MSG, I love it because it goes in nearly every time. I would have loved for the Knicks to compete, because I wish he could have just kept going like that all night. He would have gotten that 50 point triple double. For real, maybe 60.
Watching the entire game, it was the ugliest basketball I’ve seen in a long time. The comparison from this game and the game which followed (Portland-San Antonio) isn’t even close. I’m concerned the number of bad shots Cleveland took, including the variety of 18+ foot turnarounds that LeBron had. Possessions like that lose playoff games. In addition, the Knicks most of the second quarter were getting wide open looks off the pick and fade and a lot of open layups. Of course they don’t fall when Al Harrington is taking them, but when it’s Rasheed Wallace, Kevin Garnett, Rashard Lewis, etc they’ll be falling. Cleveland had significantly fewer good possessions than the Knicks, more turnovers (against a team and coach noted for giving up on the philosophy of defense in it’s most basic form) and more contested shots. The Cavs won not because they played better basketball, but because they are better than the Knicks. Mike Brown went to the stand and watch LeBron offense in the first quarter, we’ve seen how effective that is against good teams.
Why did Mike Brown let the Knicks get away with starting 6’9″ David Lee at center? Why didn’t Shaq have more touches down low to abuse that matchup when it’s the most obvious mis-match on the floor?
-I propose Boobie’s new nickname should be Zombie, because he was dead to me last year, but he’s slowly but surely rising from the dead this season. I really hope he can keep it up.
-I think I liked JJ starting/Andy coming off the bench, but as stated multiple times, you really can’t draw any conclusions from this game. Shaq/JJ and Z/Andy make better pairs than the other way around, but I still think the latter pair should be the starting pair.
-NEEDS MORE LAST YEAR’S STARTING 5 ON THE FLOOR TOGETHER!
-Overall, I really get the sense that the Cavs don’t care about the regular season. They realized last year that the best regular season record and $3 can get you homecourt advantage throughout the playoffs and a small coffee at Starsucks, but doesn’t guarantee even making the finals. I think they are just coasting and experimenting, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks (I don’t think spaghetti is the right word there, but I had a college roommate come home one night bombed out of his mind and tape newspaper to the wall and throw wet spaghetti at it and make “spaghetti art.” Ah college…). Unfortunately, MB hasn’t realized that Twin Towers does not make for good spaghetti art.
I was there, and let’s just say it is scary how much the Knick fans love Lebron.
I just rewatched this game on ESPN360 and well, it wasn’t much of a game after the first quarter. Yeah, the Knicks “fought” their way back in, but with the Cavs on the second night of a back to back and the Knicks down by 20 and with only a few guys on the team expecting to be a long-term part of the team, it kinda dragged.
So I had time to think about other stuff…
There are many, many reasons why it’d be against Lebron’s interests to leave Cleveland next summer. He’s already on a perennial contender built to accentuate his game, he’s got a loaded owner who is willing to spend $ to win regardless of the economy, he’s actually FROM Ohio and seems to care about it, and his current team can pay him more than anyone else can. But everyone knows that. I want to talk about Carlos Boozer.
I can’t help but think that Carlos Boozer’s underhanded way of leaving for Utah MUST have made an impression on Lebron. In his rookie year, Boozer was one of the only other guys on the team who could actually PLAY and then the guy breaks a verbal agreement with a blind guy to go to Utah and get more money a year earlier when the Cavs had dropped his option solely to re-sign him. Even if Lebron doesn’t actually BLAME Boozer for what went down (after all, it’s business and Utah offered him a LOT more), I’m guessing that he learned at least two lessons from it:
1) Boozer’s reputation was never the same. He went from great guy to villain overnight and basically NOBODY likes the guy anymore outside of Utah, and probably not even there much these days. Being perceived as a huge jerk who betrays his team and fans for money has its consequences and fans don’t forget it.
Lebron is looking to be a global icon, not just a guy that his current team’s local fans love. Leaving Cleveland for “bigger market” reasons would undercut his marketability to the point that it’d be pure idiocy unless he was truly able to establish a dynasty right off the bat without much of a rebuilding process. And there really isn’t much reason to believe that any of the other teams out there have much of a better shot than his own does – which brings us to…
2) While Utah had been arguably better when Boozer left Ohio, the Cavs ended up being the team that went to the finals while Utah has been relatively unrewarded for their performances. Think about that. Between Carlos Boozer and Sasha Pavlovic, only one of them has ever been to the NBA finals.
Right now the Cavs are the lone contender in the Central Division and that means less wear and tear in the regular season as well as a better shot at the post-season. Lebron knows that his main shot at boosting his marketability will come from winning championships and the Lakers have shown that when you’ve got a truly top-level player, you can utterly rebuild your title contending team around him in fairly short order as long as you’re willing to spend the money. As far as coaching goes, Mike Brown manages to get his guys to play tough defense without being one of those abrasive, alienating taskmasters that teams tend to tune out after a couple of years of overachieving (Scott Skiles, Byron Scott, Larry Brown). Sure Brown’s weak as an offensive coach, but that’s been shown to be something that an assistant can solve.
KG wasn’t willing to give up on Minnesota even after years of ridiculous mismanagement by Kevin McHale because there simply wasn’t any guarantee that the place he’d go to would actually be better when he got there. It wasn’t until Ray Allen had been added to Paul Pierce that he actually considered going to Boston.
But that’s not available for Lebron. There’s no way the Cavs will trade him and nobody with the cap space to sign him actually has a set of bona fide stars to make the journey worthwhile even if he COULD maintain his honest, marketable image in the process.
People will respect his (potential) choice to leave Cleveland if and only if he can convince people that it’s about WINNING. Right now, Lebron is NOT one of the people who can make that claim (Shaq doesn’t get himself traded to your team if you don’t have a clear shot at a title!) Otherwise, he’ll risk getting some of that Boozer stench – and it doesn’t wash off easily.
(Yeah, and don’t get mixed up with some woman in your hotel room in Colorado and subsequently rat out Shaq to the cops without any provocation whatsoever. That hurts your image, too…)
Thoughts from the game:
- Jamario Moon missed a three from the corner and hesitated the next time he got one there even though he was wide open. Mr. Moon needs to watch some Sasha Pavlovic video and realize that on this Cavs team, when you’re open in the corner, Mike Brown wants you to shoot it even if you missed your last three shots. Moon needs to spread the floor and shoot open threes to the best of his ability with no regard for what happened last time. The mere threat of it spaces the floor well. Guys who shoot threes confidently get covered even if they aren’t really that good at it, while guys that don’t even try get left wide open while their guy collapses into the paint. On the Cavs, nobody but Shaq gets to pass up open jumpers on the perimeter (even Andy has to shoot the midrange jumpers these days).
- Shaq is a LOT slower that Ben Wallace. Shaq looks slow next to Ilgauskas when it comes to covering his man out of the paint. Hope that doesn’t end up biting them against the Celtics, where both Wallace and KG are exceptional big man shooters.
- Lebron shot a LOT of jumpers today, but I feel like he’s actually working on the part of his game, rather than being forced into it. In the first quarter, he had a wicked turnaround three that Larry Hughes couldn’t have contested any better – but it looked different this year because he pivoting when he shot it, instead of the usual face-up “I’m so freaking fast and athletic that you simply can’t contest it” shots that I’m used to seeing out there. Let me emphasize this… The Knicks did NOT take away Lebron’s lanes to the hoop. Lebron shot from outside because he WANTED to shoot from outside and he did it in a way that I haven’t really seen before. I’m guessing that he’s trying to expand his game so that he can complement Shaq’s need to occupy the paint.
- A lot of the Cavs’ defensive intensity comes from Delonte West. Dude’s got so much hustle that he made periods of that lazily-paced game unreasonably watchable. Hope he’s back into the starting lineup soon.
- Even if Hickson develops into a rotation regular, the Cavs are going to miss Joe Smith’s midrange shooting touch. He was too slow to guard Rashard Lewis in the playoffs last year, but he was a big asset in the regular season playing the stretch 4. Hope Hickson’s working on his J…
There’s a fundamental problem here: the Cavs aren’t taking games seriously, and when they do, they say – well, we need more time to learn how to play together and to gel. There was no excuse for treating the pre-season like they did (the starters hardly played at all). And they are treating games like this one, against the Knicks – like they treated the pre-season game. The Cavs should have been working on ball movement, on getting good looks, etc – every possession – whether its a playoff game versus the Magic, or an early season game against the Knicks.
This team seems to be a huge step down from last years’. Pavlovic was much better than Moon. Wallace is better defensively than Shaq. Parker is no-where near as good as West (on D, or on O). And we no longer even have Wally to help spread the floor on O (though Gibson is returning to form). Z looks out of rhythm in his new role, and Mo seems to be as bad as Larry Hughes now. I’m not sure what the answer is, but it seems to me – why not start with the team that won 66 games last year, and let the new players earn their roles. Shaq included.