Recap: Indiana 125, Cleveland 113 (or, Repetition Compulsion)

Before you ask, yes, I know the Cavs are missing three starters. That’s irrelevant to the fact that the Cavs coaching staff are making the same mistakes they’ve been making for years. The Cavs lost to Indiana after turning a 15-point first quarter lead into a 12 point deficit at halftime, hanging around in the second half, and then cutting the diff to two with 4:12 left, before they stopped accounting for the Pacers’ best player. Tyrese Halliburton buried three straight triples to put Indy up 10 with 2:44 left, and anyone who follows the Association knows that a Rick Carlisle coached team wasn’t going to blow that lead. Myles Turner added the next five points for Indy, and sent the wine and gold to the showers.

The Good: Caris LeVert cooked up a monster 22 point first quarter. He couldn’t miss. It was amazing. Watch the highlights. His J was wet, his drives were inspired, and he was as hot as Morimoto’s wok. The Cavs were up 27-12 before a Rick Carlisle rage timeout.

Enter Georges Niang who missed a wide open three, failed to secure an easy rebound, and committed a bad foul in just 19 seconds to start off his night. It was a truly inspired level of shittiness. Indy proceeded to roast Niang, going on a 19-5 run to close out the last five minutes: cooking him in one-on-one situations, abusing his complete lack of NBA athleticism on the boards, graciously accepting his shitty turnovers, and shooting over his chonky closeouts to finish the first down 36-31.

If you look at the box score, you’ll note that Emoni Bates clocked an astounding -15 in six and a half minutes. Don’t be fooled. Emoni was like a deer in the headlights and looked completely overwhelmed with the speed of the game, but this stretch to close the first and open the second wasn’t on him or Craig Porter Jr.’s -10 in 3:39. Nope those guys are rookies in their first game. They’re gonna be overwhelmed, and they mostly floated on offense (if you want to call what the Cavs’ were running after LeVert went to the bench “offense,”), but CPJ at least played some nice D.  It’s not on them. It is impossible to understate the stench that emenated from Georges’ fat tire fire in this stretch. He delivered among the most useless and unathletic NBA stints I’ve ever seen. By the middle of the second, Indy led by eight, and Georges was thankfully relegated back to the bench. Enter Damian Jones.

Jones was fine this game. He grabbed a handful of rebounds in his six minutes, but lost a pass from Caris Levert that hit him in the hands and would’ve been a dunk. He still used his size on the boards and to defend around the basket. Watching Jones isn’t pretty but he’s more playable than Niang at this point, and likely needs more minutes than just as Evan’s backup.

Mobley started slow again with some bad possessions, but clearly got fed up with not living up to his potential and started taking the game into his own hands. Let me take you to a recent scouting report Ben Werth sent us on Evan.

Mobley doesn’t trust his left hand enough. He simply cannot continue to bring the ball back to this right hand while going left against a good shotblocker. He had to hold the entire interior together on the defensive end, so I don’t expect him to dominate offensively while JA is out, but shoot a lefty jump hook for the love of basketball.

This was the key to getting going for Evan: he stopped settling for that exaggerated turnaround, and usied his left hand. Evan was a whirlwind this game, and his dominance was far and away the best takeaway from Saturdays night. Evan started bringing the ball up and going straight into the post when he got a small guy on him, or facing up and going to the rack when he had a bigger guy on him. Most importantly, Mobley started dunking and laying it in with his left hand when he had the advantage with that shoulder. He used his monster length and quick leaping ability to get himself dunks and layups at the rim, spin-moving himself around hapless Pacer defenders, and working the offensive glass in a delicious two-man game with Max Strus.

Defensively, it was among his best games as well. Mobley the Younger managed to simultaneously help on defense, smother guys in one-on-one D, and grab every rebound in sight. (Cleveland won the board battle 46-42 — somewhere, CLF is smiling). Evan spun is way into a third-year Giannis line: 33/14/3 with three blocks. Most importantly, his game seemed completely sustainable: not flukey at all. This was the Evan Mobley we’ve been waiting for on offense, and the best version of himself on defense.

As we noted earlier, Caris LeVert cooked up a masterpiece appetizer in the first quarter, but that stretch, sadly, was flukey, as Caris failed to sustain his heady play, shooting 3-16 after the first and underbaking his cake in the Chopped dessert round. He did, at least, drop six dimes. In his defense, Caris looked pretty darned wore out from carrying the Cavs on his back, and didn’t have the best defensive night (though few of the Cavs’ perimeter guys did).

Okoro and Wade were competent starters this game: defending and hitting timely buckets. While dropping 17 between the two of them. Okora drew multiple offensive fouls, got free at the rim, and most importantly, rebounded. Wade hit 2-5 from deep, was hard to get around on defense, and stayed out of everyone else’s way. That’s all you want.

Max Strus contributed another very solid night, and I’m happy to say it appears I was wrong about his signing. Strus doesn’t remotely look like an overpay so far with another stellar 21/11/6 performance on only one turnover. The jumper is legit, he can score out of any curl screen, and he really has been hitting the boards. Max’s playmaking, especially with Evan Mobley was one of the real highlights of the night. The Maximum Mobley pick-and-roll was poetry. Multiple times, Strus routinely picked up two defenders on drives to the bucket and threw the rock high off the glass. Evan Mobley lurked, leaped, and slammed the basketballs home after they bounced on the rim. I don’t know if they gave Strus assists for that, but the action brought back the heady days of the Commonwealth Connection: the Delly/TT flob play. Is it a pass? Is it a shot? Does it matter?

The Bad: Unfortunately Max was complicit in the complete and total breakdown defensively late on Tyrese Halliburton (I’ve queued up the sequence above). Someone in the front rows of the sideline opposite the Cavs’ bench was talking trash to Ty, and boy did he ever take it personally. First, Hali got free off a beautiful, drive-kick-relocate-shoot action, against a completely gassed Cavs’ squad who repeatedly failed to recover to movement shooters in the second half (especially on the weak side). The next two looks Hali got were the kind a loser team gives to opponents. Indy set a quick ball screen early in the offense five foot behind the arc, the Cavs didn’t get over the screen, and the help defender was 15 feet from the level of the screen. Bang! Two shots to the gut. Tyrese ran to the other end of the court and screamed some smack at whichever jabroni was dumb enough to taunt one of the Association’s best young point guards as JB took a timeout to negotiate his surrender.

It’s coaching or execution in a situation like that, and unfortunately, the Cavs looked unprepared for the speed and pace of Indiana, and repeatedly lost their guys late. Okoro, LeVert, and Strus all seemed complicit here as they were waiting for Mobley to just do everything on D. Yes, the Cavs were gassed, especially LeVert. Max and Caris should not have played 86 minutes. I get that Koby doesn’t trust the young guys, and Mitchell, Garland, and Ty Jerome were all OUT, but JB has to find a way to get those guys rest. At the very least, he has to do it because the Cavs’ can’t afford to get more rotation players hurt. Just behind that in importance, the Cavs can’t win if they’re too exhausted at the end of the game to finish. This has been an issue for three seasons with JB: running guys into the ground until they can’t finish games.

I’m not 100% sure this new faster pace even helps Cleveland, who always seem to have a third of the team hurt anyway. You can play fast or you can play a short rotation longer minutes. It is very hard to do both. If you’re going to increase your pace of play and play a fast game, you have to play more players. The Pacers play at the fourth fastest pace in the Association, but used a 10 player rotation. The Cavs tried to do that, but clearly didn’t have a plan for managing LeVert’s minutes after riding his hot hand in the first frame. Craig Porter Junior had some solid minutes in the first half, but not a lot of offensive production, and wasn’t seen in the second half. Instead we got Sam Merrill, who was 0-2, but played with reckless abandon: diving for loose balls, and rebounding. Yet he only played 5:33. LeVert and Strus could’ve sat for a few more minutes in the third.

For two reasons, Cleveland has to commit to a sustainable rotation every game, whether or not they it might hurt their odds of winning in the short term. Otherwise, we’re going to see more and more guys worn out at the end of games, or worse, hurt. Mitchell played 42 on Friday, and I seemed to come up lame right at the end of the game. These minutes counts are leading to the outcomes that have plagued the Cavs’ the last few years: swaths of players missing games. Second, how are substitutes ever supposed to get a rhythm, if their minutes counts are so low?

Thankfully, we saw some Tristan Thompson this game, and he was just as effective as he was in the pre-season: 4/5/2 in eight minutes. He’s the best screen setter on the team, and you can bump him up to 40 minutes a week. He looks in much better shape than I saw him in the previous few seasons, and he’s playing competent ball, unlike Georges “I just stole $25 million” Niang. Give TT or Jones Niang’s minutes till The Minivan gets in shape or we collectively agree to fire Georges into the sun.

Finally, yet again, J.B. lost crucial momentum due to his inability to intelligently use his coach’s challenge. Evan Mobley got a lot of cheap whistles this one and battled foul trouble throughout the night. A particularly loathsome call came in the second quarter when Mobley got whistled for his third foul: an offensive foul on a screen in the right corner against T.J. McConnell. It was a total phantom call and a flop by McConnell. As soon as I saw the replay I yelled at the TV that JB needed to challenge to keep Mobley on the floor. Nope. Indy had smartly already inbounded (McConnell is such a heady bench guard). How are we in the fourth year of the J.B. Bickerstaff experience, and the Cavs still no system for quickly assessing calls, and using coach’s challenges on key calls? How is the third foul on your most important player this game not a key call? Hell, the challenge would’ve likely gotten the Cav a point on a flopping tech!

(OK, I’m skeptical on this last one. This was another night of putrid officiating. At one point, Max Strus got a technical from a ref 40 feet behind his back as he was discussing a call with someone else off camera.)

I get it. J.B. doesn’t seem to like to use coach’s challenges and seems bothered that they exist at all, but you can’t coach professional basketball and not use every tool at your disposal. How has coach B not gotten better at this? Just because you don’t believe in something, doesn’t mean you can just choose not to deal with it! Greg Popovich hates the NBA three-point-line. That doesn’t mean Pop tells his team not to shoot threes!

I will forgive the Cavs failing to rotate to weak side shooters and not running any of their own action or movement on the weak side. I’ll even forgive the horrendous defense the team played on Hali down the stretch. It’s not like Bickerstaff’s out there guarding opponents himself. But John Blair remains unprepared when it comes to managing minutes, rotations, and challenges. These have been issues for the entirety of his four years as a coach. How many years are we going to keep making excuses for the basic coaching duties Bickerstaff has failed to improve upon whether the starters are healthy or not?

The Ugly: The Cavs’ failed to add enough depth at the power forward and center spots in the summer after they’d dealt with injury troubles to their big men last three seasons. Further, the Georges Niang debacle makes the Kevin Love debacle seem even more incompetent. Remember last season, when the Cavs mismanaged Kevin Love’s hand injury, signed Danny Green off the street and gave him minutes over Kevin Love, leading to Kev asking out? This was a guy who the Cavs were already talking about re-signing as of last fall. What the hell happened in the last year? How did the Cavs alienate Kevin Love so badly? No one in the Cavs front office has sufficiently answered this question.

The Love/Niang comparison wouldn’t be relevant if Georges Niang weren’t hooping like a Butterball turkey so far, while Kev is posting gaudy numbers in two games for Miami. Let’s be honest. Niang wasn’t a positive player last season, either. With as bad as Kevin Love’s season was at times last year, he was still an order of magnitude better than Niang at everything except shooting. As an elite defensive rebounder, Kev was the answer to the Cavs’ rebound problem, and they haven’t consistently solved it in his absence. Aside from Kev’s injury ravaged 2021 season (another disaster class in injury management), Kev’s outplayed Niang every single season despite being five years older. The most hilarious thing? Niang’s making twice as much money as the much more effective Love with a three-year $25 million dollar contract versus a two year $7.9 million dollar deal for Kev.

Let’s be crystal clear: Georges Niang’s game is as out of shape as he looks, and say what you want about Kevin Love, he’s kept himself in very good shape since he was traded to Cleveland in 2015. That the Kevin Love debacle is still haunting Cleveland nine months later is an indictment of how the Cavs dealt with a hall-of-famer, a Cavs’ legend, and their own attempts to replace his production.

Cleveland host the Knicks, Tuesday, then travel to the Big Apple, Wednesday for a back-to-back a rematch with Jalen Brunson and Co. It will reignite all the talk of the Cavs’ offensive and rebounding woes against New York and Donovan Mitchell’s possible desire to lace em up for the Knickerbockers. In a way, the Cavs’ season really starts Halloween night. With games Friday in Indianapolis and Sunday hosting the Warriors, let’s hope the wine and gold get some bodies back, or it could be long week of repeating the past.