Recap: Milwaukee 129, Cleveland 112 (Pick Your Poison)

Traveling to Milwaukee to face the Bucks on Monday night the Cavaliers had to game plan for how to stop an all too familiar type of offense:  one that forces opponents to choose between stopping a dynamic star player that is close to unstoppable or stopping the three point snipers posted all around him.  All things considered, the Cavs were reasonably successful in that struggle.  The final score of Milwaukee 129 to Cleveland’s 112 was obviously not a victory but there were promising signs of success in being able to considerably stifle the “Greek Freak” and force the shooters around him to carry the offense.  While the Wine and Gold were unable to steal a win against the formidable Bucks roster, these small victories are what must carry teams stuck in the NBA purgatory of a “rebuild”.  In that light, and with some inspiration from EG’s style, I will break things down into “the Bad”, the “Good”, and then don my personal set of Wine and Gold colored glasses for my take on “the Hopeful” things from the game that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The Bad

The ultimate problem with “picking your poison” is that whatever you pick is still poison.  While the Cavs, and specifically Thompson, did an admirable job building walls in front of Giannis, that led to too many knock down shooters left open or harried by a late closeout at best.  The Bucks did not waste these opportunities and poured in the triples early and often.  TT continually did his best to hold strong against The Alphabet’s stampeding drives, but he couldn’t do it alone.  Cleveland did a good job of using help defenders to form a wall in front of Giannis which invariably led to one perimeter shooter getting just enough freedom to get a quality look.  The benefit of selecting the poison of “shooters” is that shooters can miss.  They didn’t miss.

Offensively the Cavs did not have the same kind of prolific success that they did two nights prior versus Indiana.  Antetokounmpo was guarding Love for most of the night and so he just did not have the same freedom and space to operate.  Well into the first half most of Love’s touches were less than productive possessions outside the three point line that led to the offense moving on to another option.  An early scoring run by Cedi Osman and some efficient hooks from TT kept them in it early and actually leading to end the first quarter.  Unfortunately Milwaukee stayed scorching hot and with the Cavs only hitting three triples in the first half, keeping up with the Bucks offense was simply unteneble.  The “make or miss league” refrain only excuses so much of Cleveland’s scoring trouble when ill advised early threes and iso drives into traffic began to continually make the defense’s job harder by leading to repetitive transition opportunities.

Sexton and Garland both had considerable defensive woes when Milwaukee’s guards drove to the basket instead of Giannis.  Bledsoe and Hill specifically seemed to get a shoulder in front of the young Cavalier point guards almost at will, though luckily Bledsoe did them the favor of missing several of those easy looks he got himself. For as much success as Thompson (and Nance to a degree) had in stopping the “Greak Freak” it is a little surprising the Bucks didn’t use more guard driven penetration.

Finally, Garland and Sexton had much less success playmaking and running the offense.  Kevin Love’s slow start gave the young point guards a little less room to work with and they ended up with a combined three assists versus four turnovers.  It would be easier to forgive a few of their miscues if their lack of assists were just due to shots not falling, but time after time the two youngsters would miss Love popping out to the three point line.  Not only did they miss out on getting him an open three but it also kept Love from getting some quality looks and makes that could have consequently relieved a lot of pressure from the offense earlier in the game.

The Good

For all the hiccups and all the threes they gave up the Cavs did have quite a few defensive successes.  Most of them involved that guy, TT, sacrificing his body to get slammed into again and again by the “Greek Freak”.  Using hastily assembled walls of Thompson and the next closest defender Cleveland was able to force Giannis into a wildly inefficient night.  Keeping the Bucks biggest weapon to 14 points on 15 shots would have seemed like a minor miracle to last year’s Cavs.  In picking your poison between dunks and threes, stopping the dunks is probably the best bet for this team to have a shot at pulling off an upset (remember Houston missing 27 straight threes, it happens…).  TT and LNJ should be commended for repeatedly putting their bodies at risk to stop a freight train and it was amazing how often that physical presence caused a Giannis mistake.  There was a later game fast break where it was somewhat surprising to see Giannis pass up an open dunk to pass to George Hill for a layup, but in a post game interview Antetokounmpo admitted he passed it because his legs were too tired to dunk.  That alone earns the Cavs bigs an “A” for the night.

On the offensive end Cleveland did end up with a rather balanced scoring effort.  Clarkson had an efficient enough 17 points on 13 attempts and even included four assists.  Cedi had a bit of a bounce back game scoring 10 points mostly early until being seemingly forgotten about again in the offense.  Kevin Porter Jr.’s shot selection seems to be slowly improving despite the fact the the refs seem to enjoy giving the benefit of the doubt to his opponents.  Larry Nance Jr managed to put up 15 points on nine shots while shooting 50% from three point range.  Love and Thompson managed to put up 15 and 17 points respectively, despite not doing so as efficiently as the last game.  Finally Sexton put a team high 18 points on 15 shots that included some impressive speedy layups and even one instance of remembering to use the glass.  If Sexton can just start remembering to look for Love on pick and pops then his scoring will become all that much more valuable.

All in all the Cavs showed the overall weaknesses of a team in their position while also showing glimpses of how things could grow and improve.  They managed to actually cut Milwaukee’s lead all the way down to just five points in the fourth quarter before some timely triples ballooned the lead back out again.  Moral victories aside, there is value to a team that keeps scrapping and fighting.  Those are the winning habits that “tanking” can easily breed out of a team and that the Cavs must fight hard against if they don’t want to sink into the limbo of a perpetual rebuild.  The rookies seem to both buy in to what Beilein is doing while respecting the veteran talent on the team.  The veterans have been willing to lead with a mixture of necessary-for-success selfishness while still allowing the kids room to step up and to grow.  If the Cavs can continue to put up the fight that they did against the monster contender that is the Milwaukee Bucks then they will have plenty of chances to “steal” games from all different teams across the league.

The (New?) Hopeful

So what about some of the things that could be going well behind the scenes?

It is continually confusing the way that different coaches use (or don’t use) Cedi Osman.  Last season the Cavs went from trying to run everything through Cedi as a LeBron stand-in to abruptly abandoning that when they realized he was NOT in fact LeBron.  Since then has been somewhat of a back and forth of coaches overusing him as a spot up shooter, under using his slashing and playmaking skills, and then just occasionally forgetting to use him at all.  Hopefully Coach Beilein’s current haphazard use of Cedi is a symptom of balancing the teaching of the young guards versus the steadying influence of the veteran bigs.  If this is the case and Beilein just trusts that he can ratchet up Cedi’s usage as the system progresses then there is less reason for concern.  If not, and if Beilein really doesn’t want or know how to use Cedi that would be a real waste of the extension he just signed.  We can also choose to believe that perhaps Beilein is trying to get Kevin Porter Jr. as much run as possible until Dylan Windler is healthy and then when Windler returns the Cavs will implement a better usage of the similar type of small forward player that both Cedi and Windler are.

Another big question mark three games into this season is what has happened to Brandon Knight?  It seems odd that after the media buzz the team was putting out about how great Knight looked in camp that he would suddenly become glued to the bench.  Is it possible that he has been held out these games because an early trade might already be in the works?  If that is the case it could be the first step of many towards balancing this roster.  Also notably Coach Beilein’s plan to play Jordan Clarkson as the small forward “wolf” dried up rather quickly.  Perhaps he quickly learned what kind of match up problems that might cause, or else Beilein could know that the logjam of guards might not be a long term problem after all.  Time will tell.

Finally there is the surprisingly interesting question of Tristan Thompson’s ceiling.  There are a lot of factors converging on why this could truly be a career year for TT.  He seems to finally have gotten over his most recent batch of injuries and a healthy TT is infinitely better than a slightly injured TT.  This is also a contract year for Thompson and with Cleveland in a rebuild there are many ways for him to try to establish or increase his value.  He could push to be a leader and long time leadership solution for the Cavaliers or simply try to establish as many skills as possible to round out a resume for his future employers.  Tristan has said he has a goal to make an All-Defensive team this year and if his work against Giannis is any indication then that is not impossible.  His early season numbers are already hovering close to All Star candidate levels and if he can make the notoriously bad defense of the Cavaliers from last year into an even passable defense this year then he’ll have a great foundation for his campaign.  It’s hard to predict and forecast how TT’s performance will continue since he has always been a hustle player with limited tools, but with an ability to greatly excel with those tools by sheer force of will.  How will that hold up as he tries to add more to his toolkit this season?  It will be worth watching to see.

The End

In the end the Cavaliers put up a valiant effort against a team nobody expected them to beat.  One could easily question a few of the whistles and how some of Giannis’s shoulder rushes were not charges.  One could wonder why Giannis magically went from fouling out of two games in a row to suddenly having only two personal fouls versus the Cavs.  One could question a lot of such things, especially when one is a homer…though this one still can’t help but wonder…

Either way, the Bucks shot the ball well for one hell of a game and the Cavs played tough and hung in there the best they could for a long time.  Hopefully this will be a collection of successes and failures that can both be learned from and even as Cleveland’s defensive rating took a hit they still showed some defensive fortitude.

Until the next one vs Chicago,

Go Cavs!