Live Thread: Cavs vs. Heat

The last time these two teams met, Kevin Porter, Jr., broke the spell that Miami had over the Cavs (seven straight wins over Cleveland stretching back to spring 2018), splashing huge buckets down the stretch and leading the team to an overtime victory in front of a big downtown crowd.

It was a game which is worth a full rewind, coming as it did a week after the ouster of John Beilein as coach, and against a team that would go on to become Eastern Conference champions that year.

Tonight, J.B. Bickerstaff’s honeymoon with the team is (it’s surely fair to say at this point) over, KPJ is in Houston, the Cavs’ new acquisition from Detroit has been displaced by a new big man of the future, and Kevin Love is out.

#Cavs Kevin Love is OUT tonight.

— Chris Fedor (@ChrisFedor) March 16, 2021

However, in spite of being in an 0-3 funk since having lost a tough game to Indiana just before the All-Star Break, these Cavs are still a better team, record-wise, than they were at this point last year. While it may be a long shot to get to the playoffs or the play-in, for incrementalists the Cavs’ “magic number” right now is six — which is the number of wins they need between now and the end of the season in order to surpass their performance in 2019-20.

(Should anyone need a reminder, last year the Cavs ended their truncated and bubble-exiled season 19-46, one game behind the struggling Atlanta Hawks.)

While it seems unlikely that they will right the ship against a sound Spoelstra-Reilly enterprise that has won nine of its ten last games, stranger things have happened in the NBA. And if the Cavs can scratch out more than nine points in the third quarter (see: New Orleans game) and avoid cratering again in the fourth (see: forthcoming Atlanta recap), they might give themselves a slightly better shot at an ugly win, if not recapturing the weirdly nostalgic days of a lost season — and lost talent — gone by.