The Cavs need to recapture their focus
As the majority of the NBA has settled into a pseudo-bye week ahead of the NBA Cup knockout rounds, the Cavs feel like they are in an identity crisis. Limping into the 25-game mark at 14-11, they have been haggard by injuries, disconnected on the court, and at times uninterested outside of crunch time. If you only looked at the offensive and defensive ratings (both 10th in the league, respectively), you'd think things are mostly fine, but au contraire, my naive reader, it has been some ugly basketball to watch, especially this recent stretch where they've lost five of their last seven games.
From the 3-point attempts that feel like rusty shovels trying to dig them out of a hole, the lackluster effort in transition defense, and the back-breaking miscommunications at the worst possible times, their overall lack of focus is why they are currently a play-in team as the 7th seed in the Eastern Conference. Even in their weakened state, where players like Darius Garland and Lonzo Ball have shuffled in and out of the lineup due to injury management, that hasn't entirely excused them from aspects of the game within their control. How can you explain the lazy fouls that have led their opponents to the charity stripe? They rank 26th in opponent free-throw rate according to Cleaning The Glass, allowing 24.4 points per 100 possessions from the FT line alone. For a team that has been very fundamentally sound on defense, it's been very disheartening to see guys out of position and having to foul to prevent uncontested layups. When the Cavs are at their best, they use their point-of-attack defenders to funnel the ball handler into contested shots and active hands. Yet their point-of-attack defense hasn't consistently provided enough resistance to allow the defensive shell to function as designed. The players can fix these problems; they've done it before, but right now it feels like they dial up that intensity when things are dire, and that's not how this Cavs team can treat these games when the offense is far from the historically great one it was last year.
That is not to say the sky is falling, and the Cavs won't recapture some of that magic to get back in the good graces of us Cavs fans. A lot of this stuff is correctable: some of it is getting healthier and having better personnel, and another is reestablishing the focus needed to be contenders in the Eastern Conference. If this team needed a reboot and reset, what better time than the first actual practices since early November to have a come-to-Jesus moment? If the reported testimonies from players are true, Kenny Atkinson's "eye-opening film sessions" and the "heart-to-heart conversations" between players have to be the building blocks for rebuilding this team back into contending form. For their sake, their actions better lead to more wins, or it won't be the fans having uncomfortable conversations; it'll be the front office trying to figure out how to fix this roster from wasting a year of this competitive window.
