The Cleveland Cavaliers lost to another bad team as they fell to the Chicago Bulls 127-111.
In their last four games, they’ve lost to the Golden State Warriors, who were without their three best players,
barely scraped by a then three-win Washington Wizards team missing multiple starters, lost to a Charlotte Hornets team without its best player , and were just run off the floor by a team that lost eight of their last nine.
Things are dark.
The outside shooting remains a problem. The issue isn’t that the Cavs are taking too many threes. It’s that they’re missing too many threes.
The Cavs converted on just 30.8% (12-39) of their outside shots on Wednesday. They’re now 4-8 when they shoot under 31% from beyond the arc.
Every team is reliant on the three-point shot. The best teams are typically the ones that make the most outside shots. Conversely, if you’re a bad shooting team, you’re probably going to be a bad overall team as well. And that’s what the Cavs are right now.
As problematic as the three-point shooting has been, the transition defense has been worse and less excusable.
This was a problem area against the Indiana Pacers last postseason. The Cavs couldn’t adjust to the speed they played and were dispatched in five games.
Because of that loss, they spent the offseason trying to combat the problems that their postseason defeat exposed. Their offseason moves were partially motivated by that failing, and getting in better shape was a point of emphasis throughout training camp. Then, things went sideways once they started facing teams that play fast.
The Cavs have already lost three times to the Toronto Raptors and to the Miami Heat. Both are among the fastest teams in the league. And every time they have a loss against one of those teams, head coach Kenny Atkinson and the players talk about how they need to hustle to get back on defense and show effort. But then, the next time they play a team like that, the same thing happens, and nothing changes.
In this game, the Cavs turned it over 20 times and missed 27 threes. Those will lead to transition opportunities regardless of how much you hustle. But you can’t compound that with getting beat off of made baskets as they did.
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If someone asked me for one play to sum up the Cavs’ season, I’d point to this. Donovan Mitchell scored, no one got back on defense, which led to an easy basket, and all the effort Mitchell put into scoring was a complete waste.
It’d be one thing if this were just one bad game, but it’s not. This is a team that knew transition defense was going to be an issue this season. They prepared for it, have said all the right things, but have a complete lack of ability or self-awareness to stop this from happening repeatedly.
Right now, the highest-paid team in the league is absolutely going through the motions. They can’t be bothered to compete defensively, they play with no heart, and their actions on the court seem to indicate they have no intentions of changing any of that.
There’s no edge to this team. There’s no sense that they’re going to learn from these tough experiences and become better for it. For as much as they’ve talked about adversity, they’ve never actually shown that they can overcome any difficult challenges that come their way.
Is there anyone on this team who can hold this group accountable? Their current play and recent history would say there isn’t.
This core group has been at its best when things are going well. They are the ultimate frontrunners that can compound their momentum for extended stretches or, in the case of last season, over 82 games if the wind is at their backs. There aren’t many recent examples of teams that can do that better than this core Cavs’ group.
Conversely, they cannot pull themselves up out of the mud and fight back, even against teams they are better than on paper.
They folded when they were hit by the New York Knicks in 2023. They collapsed when they got counterpunched by the Pacers last playoffs. And they’re yet to pull themselves up from that experience, even though they’ve had nearly seven months to do so.
There are real basketball reasons why this team has been so bad recently. You aren’t going to win games if you can’t shoot, and being without key rotation players is a major issue. Those are things that can be turned around. However, this group, even if it improves once it gets healthy, will never be able to live up to its potential until it learns how to confront and prevail against adversity. And unless that changes drastically, they will meet a disappointing end to this season and era of Cavs basketball.
