Recap: Clippers 113, Cavs 94 (Or, When it all goes wrong)

Overview: The Cavs followed up their worst performance of the season with an even worse performance against the Clippers on Thursday, losing by a final score of 113-94 on their home floor and suffering their first two-game losing streak of the season. Kyrie Irving led all scorers with 28 points, while J.J. Redick led the Clippers in scoring with 23 points on 9-13 shooting from the field.

The Breakdown: 

Basically, there are three ways to lose a basketball game. You can get outplayed/out-executed, outshot, or outworked. On Thursday, the Cavaliers were outplayed, outshot, and outworked. The final result was not pretty.

The Cavs Got Outplayed:

For the second game in a row, the Cavs were turning the ball over with abandon, in increasingly disappointing and creative ways. They tried to force passes through lanes that weren’t there, got their pockets picked on the dribble (Luc Richard Mbah a Moute came up with 5 steals all by his lonesome), or just flat-out lost their dribble or threw a pass into the stands without provocation.

After having some success hitting shots in the first quarter, the Cavs went away from their offense completely in the final 36 minutes of the game, relying entirely on James, Irving, or Love playing iso-ball rather than running their sets and going through multiple looks.

Meanwhile, Blake Griffin was a wizard handling and passing the ball from the high post, finishing with 11 assists, and CP3 was his usual point god self, finishing with 9, as the Clippers mixed in good interior cuts and strong drives to the hoop while their outside shooters, specifically Redick, punished the Cavs when they didn’t close out well enough. The Clippers finished with 33 assists and 11 turnovers, while the Cavs finished with 12 assists and 18 turnovers. That pretty much tells you the story of the game right there.

The Cavs Got Outshot:

The Clippers were able to get the Cavs out of their offense and stop them from getting the open 3s they’ve been beating up the weaker teams in the league with. J.R. Smith, to his credit, wasn’t forcing bad shots, but he finished 1-3 from deep. Kevin Love was 2-5 from 3 and 7-11 overall, but he stopped getting looks once the ball stopped moving, and when they would try to force-feed him, Mbah a Moute was able to shut him down in isolation/post-up scenarios without much trouble. LeBron’s only make from outside of the paint was a tough turnaround in the post. Kyrie wasn’t able to get space outside.

I could go on, but the real story for the Clippers offensively is that J.J. Redick, who usually plays like a very good basketball player with a perfect jump shot, turned into the Norse god of putting basketballs in hoops from a long way away. He absolutely tormented the Cavs, making shots off the curl when J.R. was left to cover him one-on-one, going behind the screen when J.R. tried to cheat it, or stepping inside and drilling the mid-range jumper when the Cavs sold out to run him off the line. He’s quietly become one of the more underrated players in the NBA. There’s nothing one-dimensional about a player capable of pulling a defense apart from the perimeter the way Redick did tonight.

The Cavs got outworked:

The Clippers had 14 offensive boards. The Cavs had 6, with Tristan Thompson being responsible for 4 of those. When the Clippers missed, it seemed like they were getting to their own miss as often as they weren’t, which is demoralizing when everything else is going wrong. On offense, there were the aforementioned plays where the Cavs simply gave the ball away, and defensively, there were some flat-out breakdowns in transition, semi-transition, and even the half-court that gave the Clippers wide-open layup opportunities on cuts or run-outs. One sequence saw LeBron take a three over DeAndre Jordan, miss it, then get beaten down the floor by Jordan, who threw down an alley-oop. (LeBron’s overall defensive effort was particularly egregious on Thursday.)

You combine the three above factors, and it’s going to be ugly. Ugly is what Cavs fans saw on Thursday.

Individual notes:

— Flat-out bad night for LeBron. For the second game in a row, his turnovers were unacceptable. For whatever reason, he’s had more flat-out wacky turnovers this year than he has any year before, and he was overpassing again, trying to fit passes through windows that weren’t there when he had a pretty decent driving lane.

LeBron seems to be trying to script his games a bit too much this season: he’s almost exclusively a passer in the first quarter, tries to get himself going with a few buckets at the rim in the second quarter, tries to get his jumper going in the third, and goes to his tried-and-true 3-1 pick-and-roll in the fourth if the game is close. I’d like to see him take what the defense is giving him a bit more organically, regardless of how much time is left in the game. Still, that even happens in good games, and this was a flat-out bad one. DeAndre Jordan gave him trouble at the rim, he couldn’t get shots to fall from the outside, he was falling asleep defensively, and he was a culprit in stopping the ball when the Cavaliers got behind.

— 28 points for Kyrie, but a lot of empty calories. He was inexplicably playing in a lot of the fourth quarter, he wasn’t creating for others, and he wasn’t stretching the floor. To his credit, he was a monster finishing at the rim, and he even got to the line 12 times.

— Kevin Love is great when the ball is moving, and his open shots are still going in. When the ball isn’t moving, he’s not going to give you much. The ball stopped moving after the 2nd quarter, and he all but disappeared.

— Don’t regress to the mean, Iman Shumpert. Especially when Matthew Dellavedova just reminded me how much I miss having a point guard who looks to actually create for others just this week. I want to get over Delly.

— On the bright side, Richard Jefferson was 4-6 from deep! People not named Richard Jefferson were 5-18 for the Cavs. That’s less than ideal.

— Not even my beloved Kay Felder could cheer me up tonight. 0-3 from the field, two turnovers, including one where he flat-out dribbled it off his leg, and he looked lost. Jordan McCrae, meanwhile, has gone to “he looks slightly worse than a replacement-level NBA wing” from “I think Jordan McCrae hates me personally.”

— Good thing Blake couldn’t find that 20-footer he’s been forced to lean so heavily on on Thursday — he finished 4-14 on mostly wide-open looks, so imagine how much worse it could have been.