Cavaliers' Achilles' Heel Is Team Defense, Not LeBron James' Purported Decline
NEW ORLEANS — The doubts won't doom LeBron James. The questions about his athleticism at his supposedly advanced age—two weeks short of 30—won't even fluster him, no more than the oddly-assigned Luke Babbitt could on most possessions Friday.
"You can look at it in a bad way or a good way," James said late Friday night of recent critiques of his explosiveness, after tying his season-high 41 points on an economical 24 shots against the New Orleans Pelicans. "I’ve expanded the rest of my game. I’m still out there making plays. My athleticism, obviously I’m not the 18 year old kid I was before. But I can still do the things I need to do to be successful."
The aches? They won't often impede his efforts either. His left knee began to bother him in the third quarter of Tuesday's win against Toronto for reasons he couldn't identify, before it swelled on the flight to Oklahoma City. The injury caused him to miss one game and, after it swelled again on the short flight to the Bayou, made him believe he might miss another.
But he didn't miss it, and he then went on to make eight shots in Friday's first quarter, including a couple of slams.
"I felt good in my test before the game that I was put through," he said. "Just try to go out and help our team win. It was a little bit unsuccessful though."
It was.
That's because his team's defense—not James' supposed declining athleticism—is really the single thing that, at times, can still prove too much for his offensive exploits to overcome.
That was the unmistakable message of the Cavaliers' 119-114 loss to the Pelicans, who played without their superstar, Anthony Davis, for the final 41 minutes after a chest contusion briefly left him struggling to breathe. Without their All-Star power forward, who had made his first four shots, the Pelicans still made 55.7 percent of their attempts overall, including 42.9 percent on 28 heaves from behind the arc.
Ryan Anderson made eight of those after making eight in the team's first meeting. His only obstacle Friday was too much idle time, left alone to let his mind wander before launching.
"We weren’t code red on their code [red] guys," James said. "Ryan Anderson is shooting 31 percent from the 3-point line. You just take our two games he played us he’s probably shooting 80 percent from the 3-point line."
Anderson is at 61.5 percent from deep against the Cavaliers this season.
He is at 27.6 percent against everyone else.
"Just not focused, that’s all it is," James said. "You’re not focused. A couple of them came off our plan, our principles, but a lot of them didn’t. Allowing him to get air space and not getting up into him and making him do something maybe he didn’t want to do. A great shooter like that, you can’t let them do what they want to do and that’s exactly what we did."
Lack of focus sounds familiar, because it's what the media have shown of late by dwelling a bit too much on the force with which James delivers his dunks. First, he's still scoring at a rapid rate, just doing it in a slight different and less efficient way than in the past few seasons. Second, it's not news that he will need to adjust over time; he has actually been acknowledging the inevitability of athletic decline for some time.
While he has indicated that he would like to play until he's 40, he knows he won't be exactly the same guy then that he is now, nor is he exactly the same guy now that he was in his first Cleveland stint.
Prior to the 2014 NBA Finals, I asked him whether he could see himself changing his game, taking the example of another (albeit stylistically different) star in Tim Duncan. He spoke of changing it already since he signed with Miami, with less isolation and more post-ups. That trend seems to have reversed with the Cavaliers, but the rest of his reply that June day still applies.
"I've changed my game since then and I will change my game," James said in June. "You have to. Father Time is undefeated. So me high-flying and doing the things that I'm able to do now at 29. At 36, maybe I wouldn't be able to do it. I will change my game againnif I want to continue to be helpful to a team."
He's still plenty helpful in plenty of ways to these Cavaliers, and if they fail to contend for a championship this season, it won't be because James has lost one or two of the 20 steps that he had to spare. It will be because the Cavaliers collectively—James included—have too many defensive nights like this one in New Orleans, when they were, in coach David Blatt's words, "pretty irresponsible…and late." Where they don't display enough effort and attention to detail on that side.
"We really didn't do, on an individual level, an acceptable job of defending at any point," Blatt said. "We did not control the ball. We did not close out on the three-point line. We didn't defend drivers. We didn't have aggressiveness or physicality to speak of, and you know, their output was the result."
Blatt went so far as to credit the team's media relations director, Tad Carper, for the best defensive play of the night: screaming at some corridor loiterers to pipe down and successfully achieving some silence.
"Shoot, I wish you could put on a uniform," Blatt quipped.
The guys wearing wine and gold had shown a stingier side of late, but Friday, some previously persistent problems returned.
The interior defense was a particular concern, as the bigs—especially Kevin Love and Anderson Varejao—were often out of position. Sometimes, those breakdowns led to layups. Other times, they compromised the perimeter rotations. And the one area of defensive strength for Cleveland this season, defending the long ball (the Cavaliers entered seventh in the league in defensive three-point percentage), gave way to Anderson's aerial assault.
Then, when Jrue Holiday made a long runner to put the Pelicans ahead by 13 with 2:13 left, Blatt took James out for good, even after an 8-0 run to close the gap. It was a rare show of restraint from a coach who keeps insisting that James' current minute load is "perfect."
"No," Blatt said of whether he considered inserting James later. "He had given us everything he had. You all know, and we weren't playing around, that it was questionable that he was going to play at all. He got out there and he gave us everything he had, until he was done. And no, there was no thought to putting him back in."
James, who said he was fine with that decision to help get his knee "right," certainly did enough offensively during the time he played. This was by far his most efficient work of the season, converting at a 70.8 percent clip. It was the second time he's topped 60 percent, after doing so in 26 of 77 games last season.
"He was making tough shots," said Tyreke Evans, who made a few too, as well as some easier ones, on his way to leading the Pelicans with 31 points.
With James scoring 10 more, the Cavaliers didn't need exceptional defense to prevail. Just adequate. Just not atrocious.
"They were hitting [Omer] Asik rolling and Ryan [Anderson] was getting hot again against us and Tyreke [Evans] was breaking down our defense and our interior presence just wasn’t there tonight and we just got to continue to get better at that and trust each other on the back side and stay in front of our guys," Irving said.
In other words, everything.
"I could make an easy excuse and tell you that this has been a particular tough stretch, six games in nine days," Blatt said. "And a couple of pretty tough trips. And now we're coming off a back-to-back. So all those easy outs may be part of that, why we were late. But I'm not gonna do that."
Well, too late.
"I'm just gonna tell you that we were not at the level of awareness or at the level or urgency that we had to be to guard a team that was making shots, as they were," Blatt said. "They've got three-point shooters and they really spread the floor. And with Anthony out, in some ways, it caused us a different set of problems."
A different set, perhaps, than they would have with Davis in there. But those problems still occurred on the same end of the court that typically gives the Cavs trouble.
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