Cleveland Cavaliers Must Develop Early-Season Substance, Even If It's Ugly
With a fantasy roster in a city that had previously only witnessed such things from afar, the Cleveland Cavaliers are chasing more than greatness this season.
Fans don't want mere dominance; they want aesthetically pleasing dominance. They hope to see historically significant offensive execution, astronomical win totals and championship relief for a region suffering through a 50-year drought.
Incredibly, all of those things still lie within the realm of possibilities, including the mesmerizing, Cirque du Soleil-style performances. With LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving on board, no dream seems too extravagant.
But before the Cavs can usher in the NBA's newest brand of basketball beauty, they must first embrace the ugly side of the business. Short on cohesion and the chemistry that follows, this decorated group of players is still in the infancy stage of learning how to be a team.
Adjustment Period
"We are a veteran team in terms of the players' experience," first-year coach David Blatt said, per Northeast Ohio Media Group's Chris Haynes, "but we're not a veteran team in terms of being together."
One glance at the stat sheet highlights the accuracy of Blatt's assessment.
Despite owning the largest share of the league's point-producing talent, the Cavs sit a perplexing 14th in offensive efficiency (103.4 points per 100 possessions). They are one of the 14 teams to have a two-way, net efficiency rating in the red (minus-2.1 points per 100 possessions, 19th overall). They check in at an uninspiring 16th in turnovers per game (15.5).
For James, who coughed up eight giveaways during the team's season-opening loss to the New York Knicks, the miscues underscore just how little these players know about one another.
"I'm throwing passes to where I was hoping that some of my teammates were, and they were not there, and that will come with each game, each practice," James said of the performance, per Bleacher Report's Ethan Skolnick. "It's a team that's learning each other."
That process isn't going to happen overnight. The Miami Heat, remember, stumbled out to a 9-8 start in James' first season in South Beach before eventually hitting their stride and making their first of four consecutive trips to the NBA Finals.
The Cavs have plenty of work to do if they hope to turn a similar corner. For now, their biggest test may be working against convention and letting the sum of their parts become greater than the whole. They have enough talent to survive these early tests, but it's loosely connected talent for the time being.
If outexecuting opponents is temporarily out of the question, the Cavs have another potentially potent weapon in their arsenal: outworking them.
Lighting a Fire
As Blatt was quick to let his players know after they had fewer rebounds (33-35), fewer assists (22-30) and more turnovers (19-15) than the Knicks, the effort Cleveland showed in its season opener was unacceptable.
"He just got on us," James said of Blatt's message during a meeting the following morning, per ESPN.com's Dave McMenamin. "He got on us from the time we started our meeting to the time we left. And it's great. For a team like us, we need that."
More important than Blatt's words themselves was the way his players received them. The Cavs showed a much better drive the following night, outlasting the Chicago Bulls in a 114-108 overtime thriller by flying to loose balls, crashing the glass, extending possessions and taking advantage of the opportunities those hustle plays created.
It's that type of tenacity that will allow this team to work through this feeling-out period.
There is no way for the Cavs to speed up this process. So many players are learning new roles, some feeling the weight of burdensome championship aspirations for the first time in their careers.
Love, Irving, Dion Waiters and Tristan Thompson have never before had the taste of playoff basketball. The four have also never been given a smaller piece of the pie. Love (20.9), Irving (26.9), Waiters (17.1) and Thompson (16.5) are all on pace to post career lows in usage percentage.
That transition cannot be easy. And Blatt can only offer so much help as a first-time NBA coach.
But this group should not need to be told the importance of playing hard. Not when the marathon that is an 82-game schedule offers exhaustive tests on a near nightly basis, each capable of throwing the Cavs off track if they don't bring the right level of focus inside the lines.
"Every night we have to come out and be ready to play," Tristan Thompson said, per The News-Herald's Bob Finnan. "We're at the top of the mountain, and every team wants to take us down and prove we're not that good. We have to punch in and be ready to play. We can't take nights off."
Even if the Cavs are merely a collection of individual parts, their skill level is high enough to make that work more often than not. But that ability must be paired with the type of gritty effort not always associated with a team capable of scoring at will.
At some point, this can—and probably should—become a masterpiece. But even the most well-versed art critics might look at the current squad and see nothing more than a bunch of scribbles.
It's going to take time to paint that museum-quality piece. It could be a while before James and Irving fine-tune a potential wrecking ball of a two-man game, before Love pinpoints receivers on his throwback outlet passes, before Waiters understands how to thrive away from the ball.
And the Cavs cannot afford to wait for their square pegs to morph into something capable of filling those round holes. Not when the right amount of elbow grease could force those pegs into the holes anyway.
That means continuing to hit the boards, exploding on cuts to the basket and playing a suffocating style of defense. Cleveland figures to be fighting an uphill battle to protect the rim all season—Thompson is the only player with multiple blocks so far—so stopping teams at the point of attack is paramount to the Cavs' success.
Their offensive execution should come sooner than later, but now is the time for this club to find a badly needed defensive identity.
"A one-sided approach will not stand up to scrutiny against the Spurs, or the Clippers, or the Warriors, or the Thunder (if healthy) in the Finals," wrote Sports Illustrated's Ben Golliver. "And, without a reliable interior presence, Cleveland would find itself at a real positional disadvantage against the Bulls and even the Wizards in the postseason."
Cleveland needs some early success on which to build something of substance. Once the win total starts to rise, it should be easier getting players to buy into the concept of sacrificing for the betterment of the team—or theoretically easier, at least.
So, the league's "prettiest" team on paper needs to prepare to get dirty. No matter how bright tomorrow looks, the Cavs must put in the work today to set themselves up for a possible parade down the line.
Plotting the Path Ahead
With all of two games under their belt, the Cavs are currently nothing more than a fascinating mystery.
The road to the championship podium is long and winding, surely littered with twists and turns that are impossible to see at this time.
Yet, that's what makes the present so important. This is Cleveland's chance to find itself, to build chemistry and character, to figure out which experiments work and which ones should be discarded.
And this period of discovery has as much to do with personnel as philosophy. Just as the Cavs may uncover necessary strategic adjustments, they also may find their current cast of characters is lacking—or even redundant—in certain areas.
Maybe there won't be enough touches to go around for Cleveland's offensive weapons. Or this defense will prove problematically vulnerable at the basket.
The Cavs have some enticing trade chips if they need them. Between their prospects and cache of draft picks (which includes a protected first-rounder from the Memphis Grizzlies), they should have enough to facilitate a deal should an obvious need arise.
Cleveland's greatest goals won't begin to take shape until next spring, but this is still a critical time for the organization. The Cavs may not put on the show the basketball world has been waiting to see, but finding substance is so much more important than flashing style.
Greatness is, without a doubt, within this team's reach, but it will have to work to make those dreams a reality. Nothing is given in this league, not even to its most fortunate franchise.
Unless otherwise noted, statistics used courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.
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