The Cleveland Cavaliers’ offence is broken. There just isn’t much more that can be said about it.
The numbers are grisly enough – their 77 points in a 33-point Game 2 loss to the Golden State Warriors on Sunday night were their second-fewest of the season. They shot just 35.4 per cent overall, and a particularly ghastly 21.7 per cent (5-for-23) from three. The 48-point differential through the first two games is an NBA Finals record.
And even those don’t necessarily illustrate quite well enough the impotence of Cleveland in Game 2.
The Cavs’ drive-and-kick game is suddenly dead-and-kicked. The trio, mostly, of Andre Iguodala, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green have made more difficult LeBron’s entry into the key, and a committed collapsing scheme is doing the bulk of the rest of the work in keeping James from killing Golden State inside.
The Warriors wings, as a whole, are largely disrupting the passing lanes essential to the other half of drive-and-kick.
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And, simply, when it has otherwise worked, nobody on Cleveland could drop a rock in the ocean right now. Kyrie Irving, whose marksmanship might have been the crucial component of the Cavs’ next-level offence earlier in the play-offs, has been miserable. He turned in a pitiful 0-for-3 effort from three in Game 2, and he was a listless 1-of-4 the game before. Overall he is shooting just 33.3 per cent.
Kevin Love was out of sorts even before he took a Harrison Barnes MMA-elbow to the head on Sunday night. His production across two games includes just three three-pointers made. JR Smith, dreadfully quiet in Game 1, was hardly more noticeable in Game 2. He has eight points in this series.
Remember Channing Frye? The secret ingredient in the Cavs’ sweet, sweet three-point pie? He’s played 11 minutes in two games.
The only difficult thing to determine is how responsible Golden State are for Cleveland’s utter offensive collapse and how simply inept the Cavaliers have been of their own accord.
Even Green, the Warriors’ defensive heart and soul, can’t quite seem to decide. Asked how Golden State had “figured out” Cleveland by Doris Burke in the post-game broadcast interview, the forward said, “I don’t really think it’s anything that we figured out.
“When you’re playing against a great team like this you can’t really figure them out. I think it’s the intensity and focus level that we’ve brought to the game. And if we come out – we got a lot of great defenders on this team – if we come out focused and locked in then you’re able to do something like this.
“But you can’t figure a team like this out. They’re too good for that.”
Except, of course, that right now, the Cavaliers are distinctly not too good for that. They've been nothing short of terrible.
The Warriors deserve their credit. The defensive play has been genuinely exceptional. They’ve managed to take the first two games by nearly 50 combined points even as Stephen Curry has been bad, in the opener, and then merely passable, on Sunday night.
The MVP had 18 points and efficient shooting numbers, but again he struggled to initiate offence, running around off-ball as the world’s most overqualified catch-and-shoot two-guard. It’s fairly telling that he sat the bulk of the third quarter as Golden State turned what had been at least a relatively competitive game into an embarrassing blowout. He only played 25 minutes total.
Draymond Green was the real MVP, and has been through both games this series. In addition to being he keystone in Golden State’s defence, he stepped up and drained as many threes (five) in Game 2 as the entire Cavaliers team. He finished with 28 points (believe it or not, a series high) and inspired Thompson to induct him honorarily into the Splash Brotherhood.
The bench continued to be an ace up the Warriors’ sleeve, too, with Leandro Barbosa, Shaun Livingston, Festus Ezeli and Iguodala all enjoying quality production.
But Golden State, for as very, very good as they are, still are not 24-points-per-game better than Cleveland. It is simply unavoidable that any analysis of these first two games must come back around to the Cavaliers’ failings.
They are many, and they are deep. A team who came into the series shooting 43.4 per cent on 33.2 three-point attempts per game in the play-offs have shot 27.3 per cent on only 22.0 attempts. That isn’t just struggling, it’s disintegrating.
They need to try to recover their offensive lethality. Even if it’s so costly it’s fatal defensively, at least they would be going down swinging. Bring out the Frye-Love-Irving-Smith-James threes-or-bust line-up to start Game 3, see if it can pour on some points and jar the Warriors a little bit.
Maybe it cannot. Maybe playing in the Eastern Conference has masked that Cleveland’s roster is just an inescapably awkward mis-mash of players whose offensive and defensive strengths can never quite line up right on-court. Maybe there is no path to victory, and their best play really is to go back to the defence-first, LeBron-scores-the-points-everybody-get-out-of-his-way scheme. The same scheme that lost them last year’s finals. The scheme that got David Blatt fired.
The scheme whose best-case scenario would probably only be losing by less. Maybe their best hope left really is to merely lose by less.
The Cavaliers looked throughout the play-offs like a new team in their emphasis on space and three-point shooting. If they’ve been de-emphasising that, out of cautious deference to the threat of the Warriors’ counterattack, they should clearly stop.
If they’ve instead been nullified by Golden State, then, well, there simply isn’t much of a series left to contest.
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