Cavs search for wayward defense
A few nights and a few miles apart, Mike Brown reached the same conclusion: His Cleveland Cavaliers weren’t defending.
LeBron James may be the early favorite for the MVP award. But nobody on the Cavaliers is playing at a Defensive Player of the Year level, and that’s a problem for a team that isn’t an offensive power, even with James’ greatness.
It was defense that sent Cleveland to the NBA finals last season, and it’s a big reason the Cavs have struggled so much thus far in their quest to get back.
Rarely was that more obvious than in losses at New Jersey and New York in a six-day span. The Cavs allowed the Nets – the NBA’s lowest-scoring team – to surpass their season average by nearly 14 points in a 105-97 victory on Dec. 14.
Cleveland returned to the area on Wednesday and watched the Knicks shoot a season-best 56 percent from the field while rolling to a 108-90 victory. An angry Brown noted 90 points should be enough to win, and it often was last season.
“But, we did it against the Nets, we do it tonight. We go against teams that are struggling and we just think it’s going to be easy,” Brown said. “We think we can show up and we’re going to win the game.
“If the guys on our team thought we defended tonight, we’re going to be in trouble,” Brown added in remarks that sounded just like the ones in New Jersey.
The Cavs bounced back with a much stronger effort in a 94-90 victory over the Lakers on Thursday, but the numbers were disappointing through Cleveland’s first 27 games – roughly one-third of the season.
Cleveland was letting teams shoot 46.4 percent, better than only three teams. In fact, the Cavs were tied with Golden State and worse than Phoenix, another team that isn’t known for digging in on the defensive end.
The Cavs were yielding 100.8 points per game. Last season, they limited teams to 92.9 points and 44.8 percent shooting, ranking in the top 10 in both categories.
Injuries and holdouts have prevented the Cavs from putting their preferred rotation on the floor on a regular basis. Once they can, perhaps they can return to the level they played at in 2006-07.
“We’ve had a lot of guys that missed training camp. We had a lot of injuries,” James said. “It’s been a challenge for us to get back into the mode that we were in last year when we were hitting our stride. We’ve got to come together, find out what the problem is and continue to play.”