Recap: Cavs 109, Kings 108 (or, Cohesion in Sacramento)

Recap: Cavs 109, Kings 108 (or, Cohesion in Sacramento)

2022-01-11 Off By Adam Cathcart

The Cleveland Cavaliers managed to escape from Sacramento with a victory, thanks to a little luck and a cohesive team effort that demonstrated their ability to rely upon defense to win down the stretch. The Cavs’ starting front court pounded the Kings, outrebounding the home team and swatting six shots. Kevin Love added two blocks of his own, and boosted Cleveland with 18 points off of the bench. Darius Garland distributed  11 assists and kept up a high standard on the defensive end of the floor. J.B.’s supplemental ball handlers Rajon Rondo, Lamar Stevens, and Cedi Osman all put in solid performances.

Sacramento was coming off of an embarrassing loss the prior evening in Portland, and dug deep to match Cleveland with a good contest of wills and wits in the second half. An explosion of Buddy Hield threes in the third quarter and seven Cavs turnovers in the same frame might have rattled some Clevelanders. However, the old Chris Paul maxim (“Bad teams find a way to lose”) seemed apropos in the fourth quarter. De’Aaron Fox, Tyrese Halliburton, and Harrison Barnes could not quite get to liftoff on a comeback that would match their jaw-dropping last-second win at home against the Cavs last March.  So the Kings were left to laud their own effort before, presumably, turning back to brooding on their dysfunctional organization or their odds in a play-in shootout.

First Quarter

The now-obligatory roll call of players out in health and safety protocols was thankfully quite short for this game, with no one on Cleveland sidelined by viral variants. The protocols, however, hit Sacramento harder, with the Kings losing backup center Damian Jones and starting power forward Richaun Holmes. In the more conventional injury category, Tristan Thompson sat out with right quad soreness. (Perhaps there ought to be a specific term for sitting out the game after taking on the perpetually entangled Jusuf Nurkic?) This left Sacramento thin, if not threadbare, in the frontcourt against Cleveland’s healthy squad of seven footers plus Kevin Love.

Behind starters Marvin Bagley III and the Ukranian Alex Len, the Kings could roll out only the unknown Neemias Queta, who has been playing in the G League in lovely Stockton, California, and Chimezie Metu, the former USC player in his fourth year as an NBA bench player. Metu had some confidence from a recent game-winner in Dallas, but Queta had yet to score his first basket and had appeared in but three prior games for the Kings. While Portugal can now claim its first NBA bucket thanks to Queta, the Cavs never allowed the Kings bigs to even approach the upper hand. Markkanen in particular wasted no time in dominating Harrison Barnes, who took twelve minutes to wake up before he realized he might get bailed out by the whistles.

In contrast to Darius Garland, De’Aaron Fox (0-3 and a personal foul in the quarter) looked oblivious as a distributor and the Kings quickly defaulted to “my turn, your turn” possessions between Fox and Halliburton. Meanwhile the Cavs were scoring at will in the paint and Jarrett Allen gobbled up nine rebounds. Darius wasn’t making shots but he hardly needed to, with Cedi Osman providing scoring. Lamar Stevens lost two turnovers in the quarter but rapidly settled into a solid game.

Second Quarter

The main problem that the Kings had in the second quarter was that they didn’t have Kevin Love on their team. The Cavs’ highest-paid and most efficient player went to work with successive possessions where he dropped in a midrange jumper, made three free throws, calmly swished a three off of a carom from a Halliburton block of Garland, picked up a charge in the lane, and sank another three.

Suddenly the Cavs were up 12 points, and Love’s dominant offensive bonanza was more than enough to cover over a couple of defensive miscommunications with Rondo.

J.B. made a hockey line shift, bringing in Markkanen, Mobley, Windler and Garland to join Jarrett Allen. Garland had some lapses, turning the ball over three times, including a line drive to no one when he was caught in the air jumping out of bounds. Momentum shifted to the Kings; Harrison Barnes started getting to the line regularly on touch fouls, and Jarrett Allen blew a massive dunk attempt. The Kings’ 2021 first round draft pick Devion Mitchell started picking up full court. (Like Isaac Okoro, Mitchell is a Georgian who put in a year at Auburn University.) With Sacramento’s defensive intensity picking up, the crowd had forgotten their cares and warmed to the product on the court. It was looking like a tight contest.

However, the Cavs pressed the accelerator to complete this quarter, led by Markkanen on both ends. The big Finn forced Barnes into an airball, sank a long two and then splashed a three over Bagley’s late closeout. Rajon Rondo pushed the lead further, going almost feral on a rebound and then barking to the Kings’ bench after sinking a very long three.

Rondo’s clock-management fingerprints were also on Cedi Osman’s final basket of the half and Cleveland was accordingly up big, 62-49, at the break.

Third Quarter

This was not a quarter that the Cavs will remember with great fondness. The Kings came out of the locker room with a 7-0 run, and the Cavs reciprocated by giving up seven turnovers in the quarter. Amid another Buddy Hield cluster of triples, there was a Dean Wade sighting. Wade ended up with about five and a half minutes in this game, and looked more tentative than usual, falling down a couple of times and ending the night with one rebound and two personal fouls (both on Tyrese Halliburton). Fortunately Stevens kept the Cavs in it with timely buckets, scoring seven of his nine points on the night, and serving up an alley-oop. Kevin Love stretched the floor with a couple of long twos and picked up another charge inside. But this game would be close down the stretch.

Fourth Quarter 

With Garland getting a rest to start the quarter, Rondo tried to feed Dean Wade in the corner, an admirable gesture that yielded only two Cleveland turnovers. J.B. held his nerve and finally put all of the starters back in with about 8:40 to go. The Cavs were trading twos for Sacramento’s threes, but the weight of momentum was gradually shifting to Cleveland, mainly because of mystifying and self-destructive moves by the Kings. Metu made two poor decisions, namely trying to pound the ball in the post against Evan Mobley and then throwing the ball in frustration against the stanchion and getting whistled for a technical foul. Markkanen sank another three, which the Kings countered with an Alex Len “why not?” corner three that did not manage to kiss the rim, and a Tyrese Halliburton turnover.

Kings interim coach Alvin Gentry gambled with a smaller lineup of shooters to close out the game, putting in Fox to join Halliburton and Hield vs. Cleveland’s starters (minus Lamar Stevens, plus Cedi Osman). The Cavs didn’t score after 2:30 left to go, when Markkanen buried his second catch-and-shoot three from the wing in the quarter.

Cleveland managed to hold on to withstand the Kings’ final run. The defensive highlight of the final minutes was not the last stop of Fox, but Markkanen’s manical yet controlled multiple denials of Tyrese Halliburton with about 1:40 left. Watching Hallburton futilely try to get loose for a three and meet a mobile wall of Markkanen and his amazingly swift feet in the paint was reminiscent of a certain Kevin Love possession in 2016.

That sequence might have left viewers in Halliburton’s hometown of Oshkosh, Wisconsin wondering why they hadn’t paid more attention to the big Finn when he was working down the lakeshore in Chicago. The Kings’ television announcer Mark Jones went a little Jungian and said that Markkanen had “been reborn under J.B. Bickerstaff after languishing in Chicago.”

As for the final possession, it came down to Rajon Rondo guarding De’Aaron Fox, who missed.

Randoms

  • The Cavs’ balanced attack in the frontcourt was remarkable with Mobley, Markkanen, and Allen putting up equal numbers of shots in the first quarter (5 each) and the game (14 each).
  • Sacramento missed Richaun Holmes in this game. Holmes is in his sixth year, making $10.3 million this year, and averages 13 points and 9 rebounds per game. Challenging Jarrett Allen, his shooting percentage is an enviable .692. Not bad for a preacher’s kid and 2015 second round pick who started his career playing for the green-and-white Moraine Valley Community College Cyclones in Illinois. Holmes is also the only graduate of Bowling Green State University currently in the NBA.
  • Tristan Thompson has presumably been a good locker room guy for the Kings, who are more of a random collection of egos than a cohesive team. TT has run up about a dozen DNPs this year, and is averaging 15 minutes a night, with a modest 5 rebounds and 6 points.
  • In spite of the Cavs having relinquished JaVale McGee and Isaiah Hartenstein to the Western Conference, the emergence of Evan Mobley marks a significant shifting balance of power in the NBA back to the East. Discuss.
  • Speaking of Evan Mobley, his drafting appears to have been the jewel in the crown of Koby Altman’s body of work for the Cavaliers. Altman is reportedly signing a longer-term deal with the Cavs that will have him in place for the next five or six years with an enhanced role.

  • The Cavs next take on a Jazz team licking its wounds after losing to the lowly Pistons. Not playing in Detroit were Rudy Gobert, Rudy Gay, and Joe Ingles, all out in Health and Safety Protocols. Hassan Whiteside and Eric Paschall (who had a 29-point explosion in a loss to Toronto) will probably get yet more run. Ingles might be back against the Cavs, and if not, well, then Utah has a new and carefree shooter on the squad by the name of Denzel Valentine. It’s a small world after all.

 

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CategoryRecaps
TagsCedi Osman Darius Garland Jarrett Allen Kevin Love Lauri Markkanen Rajon Rondo
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Adam

Thanks for the positive comments, nice to hear that the time in the lab is making a difference!

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NOMAD

WE ARE VERY BLESSED TO HAVE THE BEST —-WRITERS// BLOGGGERS —HERE AT CTB ——–THANKS FOR LETTING ME BE PART OF IT !!!

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Raoul

You are our inspiration!

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MikeO

Only was able to watch a bit of this one, but my impressions of Fox are the same as ever – okay player, good at times, but that contract is a stinkeroo. That’s kind of a worst case outcome for the Cavs if they gave Sexton some similar contract.

much needed win, good recap.

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scotch

Ok…i get that espn recaps are written by disinterested robots at this point i guess. But imagine the engagement the big sports websites could gather if the recaps were as good as this. Adam. effing slow clap. This was engaging as all getout.

Actually…big sports websites should be begging ya’ll to repost your recaps on their sites and paying out the arse for it.

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Simmo

Scotch, if we had nominations for comment of the year, I would be nominating yours here.

Would have trouble picking which recap of Adams I would nominate for the cap award, would probably have to flip some coins. The standard is high.

The future of CtB (and the Cavs) is bright!

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Chris Francis

Amen to that scotch! Adam in midseason form!!

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Raoul

Good recap Adam, entertaining!

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