Recap: Celtics 112, Cavs 106 (or, Norman Mailer, J.B. Bickerstaff, and NBA League Pass)

[Editor’s Note: Please Welcome Adam Cathcart who’s offered to recap a game or two that we didn’t get a chance to during the regular season. First off, the Cavs 112-106 loss to the Celtics on March 4th. Click here to watch for free on league pass.]

One of the silver linings of the COVID-19 epidemic has been the unexpected gift of NBA League Pass from Adam Silver. For fans who were not able to watch entire games, having free access to League Pass has allowed for a more in-depth look at what was effectively the last few games of the Cavs 2019-2020 season.

However, like with most things since the pandemic has hit, this process has not been without its own emotional payload or difficulty. How is someone supposed to enjoy sports during a period of national and international lockdown, particularly when the games being watched predate, ignore, and distance us from the main organising principles and anxieties of what feels like a new era?

Fortunately, the work of an American author, Norman Mailer, does speak to that core concern.

Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, and was a massive piece of writing by an audacious young novelist who was only 25. The text bore the cynicism and the authenticity of a veteran from the campaign to oust the Japanese Army from the Philippines in 1944-45. Since COVID-19 has led to a plethora of war metaphors, it is useful to revisit Mailer’s novel to be reminded that war involves many nasty things, such as highly-organized nations or groups of people shooting at one another, deafening artillery, individual acts of auto-hypnosis prior to snuffing out another human life, nauseous beach landings, and the cold calculus of bureaucratic careers being advanced among the carnage.

If the United States is anything like the United Kingdom today, those heroic souls who are today working in emergency rooms, ambulance services, and ICUs will probably have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms when the current epidemic is all over, but for most of the rest of us, the warfare is in the boredom, the grocery store, the occasionally too-slow disinfectant or too-close social encounter, and is primarily psychological.  Norman Mailer may not be concerned with the ethics of importing facemasks from China or the wage structure for Instacart workers, but he does give us an understanding that war also involves long stretches of boredom in which existential questions and daily annoyances can be weighed.

It is in one of these lulls in the fighting on the Philippines that Mailer describes an episode which gives us some insights into where we find ourselves today with NBA League Pass, at least for those of us who have been introduced to the tool while trying wait out the plague and remember what life used to be like before COVID-19. The episode concerns Roy Gallagher, an anti-communist working-class Boston Catholic and soldier fighting on an island which is said to be the gateway to the Philippines. A chaplain arrives at Gallagher’s camp to tell the soldier that back home, his pregnant wife has died in childbirth, and that she had a baby girl who is being looked after. Gallagher has become a father (at least hypothetically, assuming he survives the war), but he will never see his wife again.

Halfway around the world and entrenched in a brutal military campaign against the Japanese army, Gallagher is unable to attend the funeral. He is beset by a slew of emotions. Gallagher rages. He longs for his wife. He forgets his baby’s gender and hopes that his child is a boy so that his son can be a baseball player and make some real money. He imagines his wife’s death throes as being similar to that of the Japanese he has been killing. He revives both his petty hatred of the woman, and recalls the rapture and the calm he felt when his wife was near him.

What makes the episode truly strange and sad is that, having been hit with the news, Gallagher then begins receiving letters from his now-deceased wife. She had gone on a major letter-writing spree in the weeks leading up to the birth of their baby, and the letters were far slower in arriving than the electronic conveying of the news of her death. Gallagher is already a wreck, and he becomes caught up in each letter, eventually imagining that his wife is still alive and waiting for him; the postman in his unit debates whether or not to put the letters through as they arrive, but does so so anyway. Although the soldier’s dilemma is far more serious, Gallagher is thus stuck in a position which we now find ourselves in with NBA League Pass – we are existing in two types of time simultaneously: The season is dead – long live the season – but you can now access it in ways you never knew existed; at least while you are watching the games, the team, the Cavs, the season seems more alive than ever. But then the realization that it is gone arrives, and the ache begins again.

Like Mailer’s Gallagher reading his wife’s letters, the viewer of the Cavs on NBA League Pass cycles through emotional swings during a single viewing. Didn’t you love the Cavs after Bickerstaff took over? Didn’t they still drive you nuts at the end of games? Why was Andre Drummond jacking up 3-pointers? But wasn’t the Cavs front court championship-level? How was Colin Sexton somehow getting even faster, and breaking through his already-high ceiling nearly every night? What does Dylan Windler think he’s going to do next year? Didn’t you miss Jordan Clarkson, the top Filipino basketball player in the world and one of the great sixth men in the league? Wasn’t Kevin Love showing signs of being the veteran leader and all-around threat you always knew he was? If the Cavs let Tristan Thompson go, then who would torment Al Horford when the 76ers came to town?

Finally, was it really the case that the Drew-Beilein interregnum was all just a prelude to something really good, and that the Cavs were showing not just occasional signs of being a real NBA team, but actually a team that could win something like more than half of its games against its Eastern Conference opponents and possibly go to the playoffs? Some of these thoughts are more rational than others, but League Pass lets you go there again. So… on to the recap.

On March 4, 2020, the Boston Celtics arrived in Cleveland having endured two tough consecutive losses to the Rockets and the Nets, both in overtime. The Nets had absolutely torched the Celtics the prior night in Brooklyn with a 51-point fourth quarter, winning the game 11-2 in overtime. Not only were the Celtics playing in Cleveland without Kemba Walker, Jalen Brown, and Gordon Hayward. Guard Marcus Smart arrived in Ohio expecting a possible suspension for a confrontation with an official at the end of the Brooklyn game.

In short, the Cavs were looking at a good team, a well-coached Eastern Conference playoff team, but one that was in reality reduced to a bunch of spare parts surrounding Jason Tatum, was coming off of two demoralizing losses.

Unfortunately, the Cavs were playing with an even smaller skeleton crew, with half of the squad wearing street clothes and Kevin Porter, Jr., failed to start because of a “wardrobe malfunction” and then dropped out after less than 10 minutes of play with an injury. In spite of those constraints, coach J.B. Bickerstaff was relatively adept and, although the evidence was limited, methodical with his advice to the team. Tatum and Sexton really went at it down the stretch, and  Kevin Love showed why he is an All-Star calibre player.

You don’t have to give in to the happy talk about “building culture” amid large piles of losses in an NBA that cares about wins and which absolutely chewed up and spit out the Cavs’ most recent attempt at an unconventional coach. Nevertheless it was possible to see how the effort that went into the game against Boston carried the Cavs into the two straight wins that followed vs. the Spurs and the Nuggets.

The first quarter of the match-up with Boston was, unsurprisingly, largely about Jason Tatum. He came out immediately hot. Actually, blazing. After not touching the ball for the first few Celtics possessions, he drained two 3s in a row. Out of the Cavs timeout to called to cool off Tatum and review defensive schemes, Bickerstaff’s players were for some reason disorganized on the offensive end and settled for a bad Cedi Osman 3-point miss. After Tatum strode up to bury a third straight 3, the score was 15-6, Boston. It had the makings of a Very Bad Quarter, possibly even flashing back to the terrific thumping the Celtics B-squad laid on the Cavs in one of Beilein’s first catastrophic pre-season games, or just the 22-point loss to Boston in the home opener.

But the Cavs gathered themselves. Franchise face Colin Sexton barrelled to the hoop for a foul and hit both freebies, they got a defensive stop. Kevin Porter, Jr. showed up with a smart pass to Larry Nance (essentially KPJ’s only noteworthy play of the game), and the Cavs were back in it. Nance was everywhere, starting the Cavs’ scoring in both halves with dunks, closing off lanes to Tatum, making graceful baskets in the open floor, and yelling out assignments on defense.

Along with Nance, Kevin Love’s versatility was on full display in the first quarter, until he checked out of the lineup for a break with 2:49 remaining. Love consistently got his teammates involved, rebounded well, tossed a couple of neat flips from the elbow to Sexton, and slung a brilliant cross-court pass to Cedi. On the defensive end, Kev rejected Enes Kanter down low and even gave flashbacks to ‘The Stop’ with his shifty feet in an isolated one-on-one defensive perimeter sequence against Brad Wanamaker. (Sure, Wanamaker averages less than 7 points a game and is no Steph Curry, but when Love goes into lockdown defense champion mode, it is still worth a holler.)  When K-Love finally took his first look at the hoop by making two free throws with 4:56 to go in the first quarter, he already had five rebounds.

It has been said countless times, but bears repeating as the Cavs look at the offseason: Love is obviously good in the post, but his range from 3 is elite. In the second quarter he splashed over the statistically insignificant Marcus Smart and ended the night 5-10 from downtown, matching Tatum precisely.

The chemistry between Love and Sexton is still not fully intuitive. There are moments when it worked smoothly – in the second quarter, Sexton pulled back from what might have been a blocked shot and hit Love for an open 3-pointer. Highlight achieved. But then two trips later, Love was calling for the ball in the post, and Sexton pulled it out instead, promptly missing his own 3. Love kept feeding Sexton anyway and the Young Bull kept cashing in with drives to the hoop, ending the night with 41 points on 17-30 shooting, and six assists.

Bickerstaff was mic’ed up for this game and seemed pretty happy with Sexton. As he put it to Sexton in a time out: “You are moving the ball , attacking when it is time to attack, you are doing a hell of a job, Bull….Now go get a stop.” (For an interesting comparison, see Byron Scott mentoring second year Kyrie Irving.)

Maybe it was the lack of stretch fours and forwards generally in this game, but about halfway through the first quarter the lineups suddenly got bigger, almost as if the league had reverted to about 2007, a year when Terry Pluto and Brian Windhorst could legitimately publish the sentence “Every team wants a center like Ben Wallace.” (See The Franchise, a book which was written when Windhorst was cherubic and working for the Akron Beacon Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealer was still covering Cleveland.)

In keeping with the big man theme, Zizic checked in for Nance and tangled with Enes Kanter. The rookie Romeo Langford subbed for Tatum. While the first round pick from Indiana University shot a paltry 0-3 in his short 13 minutes, he really seemed to bother Sexton and caused two of Sexton’s four giveaways on the game.

Love and Zizic had some good back-and-forth, reminiscent of Love’s golden age in Minnesota when he had a true center in Nikola Peković and J.B. Bickerstaff was with the Timberwolves. Is Andre Drummond watching these clips?

For his part, Brad Stevens rolled out yet more centers and replaced Kanter with Robert Williams III, a 6’8” second-year player who started the season with a large new neck tattoo that, according to the Boston Globe’s optimistic assessment, was a “sign of his maturation process.” Not that the tattoos should cause us to question Williams’ judgement – it was enough to see him in action in Cleveland, flubbing two free throws, making some absurd commentary on his way down the floor, and then clobbering Nance with an elbow to the head with 30 seconds left in the half, a clear flagrant foul that was not even whistled.

Boobie Gibson joined the broadcast booth, for, verily, his Cavs bobblehead was in the stands. After Nance took the shot from Williams III, Gibson gave a verismo perspective: “The ref is wanting to see blood…I have seen guys go to jail for less.” Fortunately Nance took the classy way out and did not turn halftime into a melee.

The referees were also going easy on Marcus Smart, who finished the game 8-8 from the charity stripe. However, the guard was abysmal in the first half, forcing a bad teardrop, bricking a 3, and caroming the ball out of the cylinder on a fast break dunk attempt when Sexton was chasing him down. Smart got his first basket with 4 minutes left in the second quarter on a patented flop attempt fadeaway over Matthew Dellevadova, making him a cool 1-10 in the first 24 .

The other Celtics’ role players were showing some separation from their Cavs counterparts, a big part of the reason that Boston came out on top in this contest. In the first half, Semi Ojeleye was simply unconscious, going for a Tatum-esque 4-5 from downtown, while Cedi hit nothing and Delly was 0-2 from distance. Delly ended up going 0-8 for the game in spite of his unexpected start for the shirtless Kevin Porter, Jr., and in spite of being guarded for stretches by a rookie backup guard from Villanova who was, for a change, smaller than the Australian medal-winner.

At one point in the second quarter Bickerstaff had Porter, Wade, Zizic, Osmond, and Delly on the floor, and Porter was soon out with an unspecified hand injury. Fortunately Love was able to go heavy minutes in this game and Sexton was insatiable down the stretch. In spite of the battle of the big men and the role players going to the Celtics, the method of trapping on Tatum seemed to slow him down just enough and after Sex, Love, and Nance lead a 9-2 run to close the first half, it was 56-50, Celtics.

The second half turned into the Love and Sexton show for the Cavs, vs. Tatum and a finally-awakened Smart for the Celtics. Cleveland kept coming as Larry, Kev, and Collin were playing off each other brilliantly and started the third quarter with a 9-1 run to put wine and gold back on top, and to trigger a President Stevens rage timeout.

The Celtics clawed their way back to an eight point lead when Stevens used Williams III as a roller to give Boston a vertical threat against the back end of the Cavs’ defense. They were were playing way up on Tatum and Co. at the perimeter. The burly, athletic center scored a couple baskets and blocked a Nance hook as Boston scrambled on D and Cleveland went cold, notching only a solitary Nance dunk in a brick and turnover laden four minute stretch.

Fortunately, the Cavs remembered they Kevin Love, who authored an 8-0 run with three field goals and a dime to tie it up again. Unfortunately, the Cavs lost the battle of the last two minutes, giving up three buckets at the basket, including an inexcusable dunk to Grant Williams when the Celtics had just seven seconds to score after a Youngbull 15-footer. The quarter ended with Boston up 81-77.

Cedi Osman awoke from hibernation to give the Cavs two triples and a pair of free throws to start off the In the Fourth Quarter, and give Cleveland a brief 89-88 lead at the 7:14 mark. Cedi added another enormous trey to cut the Boston lead to 94-92 just a few minutes later. But the Cavs could not stop Marcus Smart from getting to the basket or the line.

The Cavs matched Tatum for scoring down the stretch, and drew basically even in the de facto Battle of the Big Men.  Unfortunately a half dozen very small things went wrong for the Cavs, and it was enough cumulatively to lose Cleveland the game. Delly played ferocious and effective D on Tatum down the stretch butt was posted one of his worst shooting games amid a relative hot streak for the Aussie. Osman heated up for the fourth and never stopped slashing to at least provide some garbage offensive rebounds for the bigs but was still outplayed by Boston’s Tatum.

Colin Sexton committed a key turnover with Cleveland down three at 2:31 when he leaped into the air looking to pass but no one was open. He followed it up with a 28-foot clanker 37 seconds later, before a Marcus Smart floater put Boston up eight with 87 seconds to go. The Cavs still seemed to have a shot when Kevin Love’s 30-footer found net at the one minute mark, but Sexton got called for a touch foul to give Smart two more freebies and push Boston’s lead back to 7 with 48 seconds left. Boston hit most of their free throws in the final minute free throw contest, and despite a triple that put Sexton on 41 and cut Boston’s lead to four with 13 seconds left, it was just too much to overcome.

The officials showed some ridiculous favoritism for Boston. Semi Ojeleye averages 3 points a game and has cracked double digits just twice this season, but he doubled his season high and ended with 22 points against the Cavs. In spite of once having been a Celtic himself and shaving tudied under Brad Stevens, Zizic forgot whatever he had learned from the master and got just confused enough about defensive rotations on two possessions. Dean Wade played respectable minutes but lost the ball down the stretch, and the whole team went through a couple of possessions with too many passes (rarely a problem when the former NCAA coach was running things) which then led to two 24 second violations.

For all of that, there were loads of great moments in this game. Cedi was smoking in the fourth. Sexton’s going back and forth with Tatum was extraordinary – Boobie Gibson said it best after Sexton splashed a 3 just after Tatum had buried one over Sexton, observing “He (Sexton) backs down to no one.” Despite the loss, Sexton outscored Tatum 41-32 in the end. Kevin Love had 26-14-5, and Larry Nance put up 19-15-4. It was entertaining and the game was tight throughout. Tatum was next-level with his shots at times, looking more like LeBron than anyone else in the league besides the Chosen One himself, particularly with his stepback capability.

Even the Cavs’ 24 second violations could be seen as attempts to take Bickerstaff’s words onto the court, to wit his advice “We don’t have to be in a rush…[just] get a sure shot.”

In a recent interview with Steven Jackson and Matt Barnes, Chris Paul reminded his listeners of the NBA truism that “Bad teams find a way to lose.” But watching the Cavs take on the Celtics at the beginning of March, one had the feeling that these Cavs were a good team in recovery from a bad coach, and in bad health, losing to a better team which was more desperate to get a win. Looking back at it today, the stakes were in fact incredibly small and Marcus Smart’s test on 15 March and subsequent diagnosis of infection with COVID-19 on 20 March was by far the most consequential connection of the Cleveland-Boston game to the current upheaval.

Like the fictional Roy Gallagher, we still have to occasionally drape ourselves in delusion in order to survive. We can draw ideal pictures in solitude on the beaches of the very islands where death and sickness, or at least news about it, is lingering around the corner. The Cavs’ season may be gone, but it lives in in our dual time, in moments when the cocoon of sport and the staggered experience of digital fandom finally — if temporarily — blocks out the clinical and infectious anxiety of the present moment. The Cavs’ season is to all reasonable expectations over, but on League Pass they continue their Bickerstaffian struggles against the East, and their climb upwards.