The Point Four-ward: (Regular) Season’s Greetings

President Barack Obama took in Tuesday’s Bulls/Cavs game in Chicago. In the end, POTUS’s Bulls edged the Cavs 97-95.

Four point I’m thinking about the Cleveland Cavaliers…

1.) I don’t know about you, but it felt good to watch a game in which a Cavs loss didn’t leave me emotionally spent. After the grueling ordeal that was the Cavs playoff run last year, I was just ready for some NBA basketball, win or lose.

The Cavs largely felt the same, choosing, after the game, to focus on the positives — 26 assists on 38 field goals, only 10 turnovers — and the fact that, after most of the starters might as well have been wrapped in bubble-wrap for the entire preseason, they had a chance to tie or take the lead on the game’s final play on the road and against the team many see as the Cavs’ toughest out in the Eastern Conference.

So, in the interest of keeping things light, I want to highlight what might be my favorite play from Tuesday night’s Cavs 97-95 loss: the Timofey Mozgov isolation drive.

With 9:25 left in the second quarter, Mozgov received a pass just inside the arc on the right side of the floor (going right to left on your radio dial). He faced up Pau Gasol before (sloooowly) driving baseline. When Gasol cut off the drive, Mozgov posted up against the big Spaniard, backed him down with a couple of dribbles before finishing with a sweeping left-handed hook shot… and a miss.

The moment Mozgov began to drive, it was though I could feel Cavs fans everywhere muttering “Um, this can’t be good.” But, Timo, I admire your moxie. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it hashtag worthy.

#tISOfyMozgov

2.) It was also nice to see that the Cavs defense wasn’t a complete mess. Especially in the second half, some of the aggressiveness we saw from the team during its run to the Finals was on display and, for the most part, they made the Bulls live off a steady diet of long twos. The Bulls just hit them.

Check out the Bulls’ shot chart for the fourth quarter of last night’s game:

Those are shots you’ll live with your opponent taking.

Now, compare that to the Cavs’ fourth quarter chart:

If you assume that the one super long two was meant to be a three (it probably was), the Cavs only took one shot that wasn’t a three or at the rim. After settling a bit earlier in the game, the Cavs took the more effective shots in the fourth.

Somewhere, Dion Waiters is reading this (no, of course, he’s not…), a single tear trickling down his cheek.

3.) On Monday, Mike wrote about possible scenarios for dividing up minutes in the Cavs crowded front court. This is how those minutes got divvied up on Tuesday:

Kevin Love led all of the Cavs bigs with 35 minutes, followed by Tristan Thompson’s 25, Mozgov’s 21 with Anderson Varejao logging in just under 12 minutes of game time. There’s still plenty of season left for Blatt to experiment with this rotation but, all things being equal, this is probably close to what the Cavs’ head coach had in mind when looking at his roster. This is not to say that we’ll never see hide nor hair of Sasha “Chaka” Kaun or that Varejao will see this little burn throughout the entire season but against a top Eastern Conference competitor, Blatt is going to lean heavily on Love, Thompson, and Mozgov, as he should.

But what will happen on the second night of a back-t0-back? Tonight’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies will be Blatt’s first test managing the minutes and health of his front line. Will he continue to lean on Love, who is still working his way into regular season shape following off-season shoulder surgery? Does Varejao, who the team is being cautious with as he works his way back from an Achilles injury last year, even play? Against a big Memphis front line — and still no reason to panic with a loss — a Kaun sighting is not out of the question.

4.) In preparation for / anticipation of Tuesday night’s tip-off, I watched a couple Bulls preseason games to get a sense of what might be going on further down the bench in Chicago.

Considering that Chicago has remained a playoff team in spite of all the injuries to All Star guard Derrick Rose, the Bulls have continued to draft well and accumulate a group of players who could be the future of the Bulls rotation, depending on the direction the club decides to take with Rose, Noah, Gibson and Gasol in the coming years.

Jimmy Butler was an All Star last season, but taken with the 30th overall pick, he’s actually the lowest pick of the Bulls’ recent crop of young players. Doug McDermott was the highest at number 11. After that, it’s Tony Snell (20th), Bobby Portis (22nd), Mirotic (23rd). They’re all 25 or younger and every one of them, except for the rookie Portis, played a role in the Bulls win over the Cavs on Tuesday. Butler is the closest thing to a star in that group, but the Bulls have done a great job of finding players further down in the draft, then showing patience and allowing those players to develop.

Consider this: when [insert disgruntled star player’s name here] becomes available, is there a team better stocked with quality NBA players to swing that trade than the Bulls? Maybe, the Celtics with their bevy of Nets first rounders… but not by much.