The Point Four-ward: A Riddle Wrapped In An Enigma Wrapped In A Vest

Four points I’m thinking about the Cleveland Cavaliers…

1.) Preseason basketball can be difficult to watch. It’s not always aesthetically difficult to watch — though, it can be that too. It’s difficult, this preseason especially, because it’s darn near impossible to take anything the Cavs are doing in the preseason and use it to speculate about what the Cavaliers might look like during the regular season.

The closest head coach David Blatt has come to fielding something resembling a starting line-up came in the preseason opener against the Atlanta Hawks. In that game, the Cavs rolled out Mo Williams, J.R. Smith, LeBron James, James Jones and Timofey Mozgov as the starters and they, in turn, looked like a group that could fare well against some NBA competition.

Since then, a combination of old injuries (to Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving), new injuries  (Iman Shumpert’s wrist… and now Smith is nursing a sore hamstring) and a liberal dose of veteran rest to James, Williams, Jones, Mozgov and Smith have kept each game’s active roster much like how Lisa Simpson once described Nelson Muntz. This lack of continuity — which has really been a lack of continuous player availability — has led to the Cavs struggling on their way to a 0-4 preseason record.

Unlike last season, no one is rushing to sound an alarm when the Cavs drop games this early, especially when those games don’t count. James has said that winning in the preseason is less important than seeing that they can execute some of the new sets they installed during training camp and in practice. And the presumptive starters, now including Love, are practicing together, so it’s not like they’ll be total strangers when the real games start on October 27.

But it would be nice to see some of Blatt’s planned rotations get some practice reps against another NBA team. Otherwise, the only thing this Cavs preseason is giving us is a whole lot of the Jared Cunningham show.

2.) One of the biggest questions surrounding this team once the games start counting will be how well are they going to defend. After transforming themselves into an elite defensive unit during their run to the Finals, the Cavs now find themselves down a couple of the key players (Tristan Thompson and Shumpert) who made that defensive juggernaut possible. They’re also welcoming back a couple of guys whose limitations on the defensive end kept the jugger from getting naut-y while they were on the floor last year: Love and Anderson Varejao.

For his career, Varejao has been known as an above average defender, but the dreaded combo of age and injuries have nullified whatever springiness Varejao once had, as well as taking a toll on his quickness. Especially as the league gets smaller and power forwards play further away from the basket, it’s clear that Varejao’s best position now is at center. In Monday’s game against Memphis, Varejao started at power forward next to Mozgov in an attempt to match up against the big Grizzlies front line of Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol. The Cavs’ big lineup got worked over by Randolph and Gasol’s mid-range games and  Varejao finished the game tied for a team worst -15.

3.) Similarly, in last Thursday’s game in Philadelphia, Varejao struggled defensively in limited minutes. In this game, though, Varejao showed where he can still impact a game. With much of the offense running through him, Varejao canned 5-7 shots on the way to 10 points in just over six minutes of action. Against Memphis, the wily Brazilian big dished out three assists and nabbed two steals.

Especially with Thompson still holding out, the Cavs need Varejao to be able to defend and rebound well enough to stay on the court so the second unit can take advantage of his smarts, passing and a pretty formidable mid-range game of his own. He’s shown some progress over the last few games and needs to keep it up.

As for Love… we’ll have to see. Hopefully, his poolside chat with James this summer went something like this:

Love: “So, um… could you maybe pass to me sometimes?”

James: “Help us play defense like we did after you went down and I’ll feed you the ball all day long.”

4.) Finally, the first year of Cavs: The Fantasy League was a great success. To refresh everyone’s memory (as if you could forget): Evil Genius knocked off Nate Smith’s team, the Stark Delly Treys, to claim the inaugural CtFL Fantasy Championship in a bruising contest that Nate continues to blame on shoddy work by the league’s first time commissioner. Nate has since been fined by the league for those statements, EG spent most of his championship off-season floating on an inflatable swan in Las Vegas, while the rest of CtFL went back into our fantasy gyms to work on our fantasy games in the hopes of closing the gap between EG, Nate and the rest of the league in 2015-16.

Another thing that made Cavs: The Fantasy League so much fun was that it gave us a chance to cut some of our readers in on the action. Four (lucky?) readers got to join up and see if their combination of luck and know-how was formidable enough to go up against their favorite CtB writers.

Cavs: The Blog’s staff has grown in the past year, though, so we’ll only be able to include three lucky readers in our beautiful waiver wire dance. If you’re interested in being part of Cavs: The Fantasy League, shoot me an email (the address is listed over in my bio). Then, on Friday, October 16, I’ll draw the names at random for inclusion in the league.