Cleveland Cavaliers' Greatest Challenge Will Be Acing the Chemistry Test
On paper, the Cleveland Cavaliers have all the ingredients necessary to turn their basketball laboratory into a charred husk of beams and burned-out bricks. That’s how explosive LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving can be if properly mixed and administered.
But like all masters of the field, these Cavs first must ace their chemistry tests before being allowed around such incendiaries.
That process was dealt a bit of an early blow this week when it was revealed Irving had suffered a right ankle injury and could miss Saturday’s preseason game with the Miami Heat.
“Walking boot” and “all good” seldom occupy the same sentence, of course. Whatever Irving’s ultimate timetable, his absence is sure to compromise—however slightly—his team’s already complicated chemistry learning curve.
The man tasked with teaching the subatomic specifics: David Blatt, the longtime Euroleague staple turned steward of the league’s most high-profile experiment. In his first NBA gig, no less.
Not that Blatt arrived Association side completely green; his offense, already drawing comparisons to that of the San Antonio Spurs, is nothing if not NBA-issue.
Cavs center Brendan Haywood recently described Blatt's offense to Slam Magazine’s Brendan Bowers:
"I like his offense a lot. There’s great ball movement, which is very key in the game of basketball…There’s a lot of the ball being kicked from one side of the court to another, which is important. But I said ‘Spurs-esque’ because it’s really all about ball movement—like how the Spurs create those mismatches with defenses by moving the ball so precisely.
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But there’s a stark difference between wading in with milquetoast talent and tempered ambition—as Blatt was when he was tapped as Cleveland’s next head coach on June 20, a full three weeks before James' league-shaking decision—and diving headlong into hype and championship expectations.
Having LeBron will go a long way in easing Blatt’s burden. James is the best player on the planet, but he also gives Blatt a crucial coach-by-proxy on the court, a floor general in the truest sense of the term, one capable of both reading and reacting in real time and reporting back nuances and niches Blatt and his staff might not see otherwise.
Instead, it’s in the respective roles of Love and Irving that Blatt faces arguably his biggest strategic challenge.
That might seem like a pretty nice problem to have. And in many ways it is. But just as Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra confronted his biggest names in the early days of Miami’s Big Three, recalibrating a pair of All-Stars (Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, in that case) to occupy more ancillary roles requires something of a delicate diplomacy.
Cleveland.com’s Chris Fedor underscored precisely this point in a piece penned prior to training camp:
"When Miami's Big Three formed in 2010, it started 9-8. That was in part because the players needed to learn how to play alongside each other. It wasn't easy and it took sacrifices by each member. The same will need to happen in Cleveland with James, Love and Irving. Love will be making the biggest adjustment – similar to Bosh. Love averaged 18.5 shot attempts last season and has been the focal point of Minnesota's offense the last four years. His shots and touches will decrease, and his averages will likely as well, so Love will have to focus more on efficiency and spacing the floor.
Others will have to adjust as well.
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All of which is a small price to pay for approaching the kind of basketball gestalt Blatt hopes his offense can help foster.
"If you make hard cuts, pass the ball on time and make shots, every offense looks good," Blatt told reporters (h/t Sam Amico of Fox Sports Ohio). "The way we want to play with this group, which is a high-IQ group, is to give them a chance to read and react, make good decisions and play off the defense."
Such praise goes beyond Blatt's principal proxies. Dion Waiters, Shawn Marion, Tristan Thompson, Anderson Varejao, Mike Miller: Each brings to the table his own unique set of skills, experiences and psychological quirks, elements there to stabilize and strengthen the formula on the fringes.
The story was no different in Miami, where Spoelstra's emphasis on positionless basketball allowed him to pick and plug with uncommon confidence. So long as his Big Three were grounded, the experiment would take care of itself.
In hindsight, worries over the Heat’s ability to effectively mesh the talents of its All-Star trio seem hopelessly pessimistic, even absurd. Like James, Wade and Bosh, Cleveland’s Big Three are smart enough to understand that age-old nugget of basketball wisdom: Having better teammates makes you a better player, downsized stats be damned.
If anything, Blatt’s Spursian system—tried, true, and tailor-made as it is to the talent at hand—will only make the Cavs’ learning curve that much steadier.
By contrast, it took Spoelstra more than a year to conceptually crystalize what he wanted his Heat to be. Miami, last we checked, survived just fine.
That’s not to say Cleveland’s will be a completely primrose path; big rewards necessarily demand big risks, not to mention the manifold missteps—however miniscule in scope—that happen as a matter of course.
Maybe Love’s first few outlet bullets sail astray. Maybe Kyrie’s backdoor cuts—a rarity for a player so used to controlling the ball—prove in need of savvier timing. Maybe LeBron hawking the lane backfires without Bosh there behind him. Maybe Blatt bungles a late-game play or substitution.
Anyone expecting these Cavs to charge unchallenged out of the gate understands neither human nature nor NBA history. You don’t throw three masters on a canvas and expect a mural overnight. If chemistry weren’t a real commodity, Abbey Road would’ve been the Beatles’ first album, rather than their 11th.
Powerful ingredients make Blatt’s basketball experiment one rife with challenges. Then again, no man-made revolution—whether sparked on battlefields, blackboards or basketball courts—would be possible without them.
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