David Blatt Left Looking for Answers as Cavs Hope to Rebound in Game 2 vs. Bulls
CLEVELAND — All Monday night, it seemed as if LeBron James, his coach and his teammates were just throwing stuff at walls, hoping that something stuck, only to see everything eventually slide sadly down to the floor.
Now, from back near the baseline, where he was trying to keep offensive rebounding specialist Taj Gibson at bay while Kyrie Irving was getting beat off the bounce and Tristan Thompson was scrambling back to help and Iman Shumpert was failing to rotate from the backside, James watched Pau Gasol sink his eighth jumper without a Cavalier in sight of the Bulls' sweet-shooting power forward.
So, after the ball ripped through the net and bounced up into his hand, James fired it angrily into the stanchion.
That didn't stick either.
Between now and Wednesday, when the Cavaliers will play Game 2, he and his teammates—and especially David Blatt—better find something that does.
"I wasn't that good tonight," James said later, after 19 points, 15 rebounds, nine assists and six turnovers, three of which had him scolding himself, especially for breaking the golden rule against the jump-pass.
No, he wasn't that good, not for him, especially not after his putback cut the Bulls lead to two with 6:18 remaining. He was 0-of-3 with two turnovers as Chicago pulled away, and Irving, who needs to be at minimum the second-best player in this series, wasn't good enough either. While some of Irving's 30 points were spectacular, he repeatedly let Rose buzz by him on the other end.
Cleveland's plan, however, was worse than anyone played.
And for all of Blatt's commendable work this season, whether it was weathering the scrutiny storms or incorporating three new components or tapering his stars' minutes, he now finds himself in a pickle jar.
That jar has pickles aplenty.
Sour pickles.
Start with whom to start, since the Mike Miller small ball experiment, while nostalgic and borne of decent intentions (creating some spacing in Kevin Love's absence), was something short of the smashing success that it was for the Miami Heat against the San Antonio Spurs in the 2013 NBA Finals. Miller was a minus-20 in his 16 minutes Monday, and by the time he checked out after his first stint, his primary assignment, Mike Dunleavy, had scored 11 points as the Cavaliers trailed, 21-7.
James Jones, Miller's long-time teammate and close friend, had expected Miller to perform well after little usage during the season: "I've seen this movie before," Jones said.
Yet while Miller had been a key contributor in previous postseasons after extended stays in cold storage, he never found any rhythm this season, shooting 32.5 percent in 52 appearances, going largely ignored by Blatt for weeks as the coach tightened his rotation and used Jones in the role of fill-in floor spacer. It was unreasonable to expect Miller to find it now, especially after he didn't play a minute in the Boston series, which meant he hadn't played in exactly three weeks. And prior to playing 77 minutes in the Cavaliers' meaningless last four games of the regular season, he had played a total of 15 minutes between March 4 and April 9.
The lineup Blatt started Monday, with Miller at small forward?
That lineup hadn't played a minute together all season.
Asked about another lineup change, Blatt said late Monday night that he was "thinking about everything. I think that for us not to have our normal rotation and normal roster, we have to adjust to things and we have to try to be creative."
He certainly was.
He went with more conventional lineups and assignments the first time he saw the Bulls, back in the preseason in Columbus, than he did in the first game of the postseason's second round.
Some of that was circumstance, for sure, and while Blatt started his press conference by announcing there would be "no excuses," he's also made no secret of the challenges he's encountering without Love for the remainder of the postseason and the suspended J.R. Smith for the first two games. Such circumstances aside, something Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau said Monday rang true: "Kevin (Love) gives them the size, the rebounding, the shot. But their roster is built so that they can manage if a guy is hurt or if they are out. Any team that has LeBron and Kyrie, they're not short-handed."
But the way Blatt deployed James, in particular, may have been short-sighted.
He put James on the offensively-limited Joakim Noah, likely to preserve James for all his other duties. Noah didn't score all night, but that could have been the case had someone else checked him early, considering how sluggish and sloppy Noah seemed throughout.
Meanwhile, Dunleavy got off against Miller, and while Shumpert did decent early work on Jimmy Butler, James took some time to engage overall. That has sometimes been an issue, when he hasn't had to work from the start on defense, and this time he was coming off an eight-day layoff. By the end of the night, James had switched all over the place—he recalled defending everyone but Aaron Brooks—but Cleveland may be better-served if he isn't cross-matched so often, going from big to small (Kirk Hinrich) to big (occasionally Gasol). It might be better if he just guards the guy (Butler) who almost always guards him, unless Rose requires his attention.
It might be better, too, if Blatt can find three complementary pieces on offense.
Again, here, the criticism comes with a caveat—when Erik Spoelstra lost Chris Bosh during the 2012 postseason, everything around James and Dwyane Wade was a mushy mess for a while. It took some time for Spoelstra to settle on a workable rotation over the course of a hotly contested series against Indiana, and then against Boston, one that would allow the two stars to get close to their best and overcome Bosh's absence.
It's not clear that for all Blatt's tinkering Monday, from his towering lineups with Timofey Mozgov and Thompson up front to his tiny ones with Thompson at center, James at power forward and Irving, Shumpert and Matthew Dellavedova in the backcourt, that he found anything approaching a suitable answer for this series.
The latter worked for a while, but eventually tired, as Shumpert played the entire second half, Thompson played the final 20:22, Dellavedova the final 15:50 and Irving the final 14:42. This was a Blatt bugaboo at times during the regular season, such as when rookie Joe Harris played the final 19:28 against the Spurs.
Smith's return in Game 3 should help there, at least in terms of saving Shumpert.
But the Cavaliers can't wait that long to correct their most critical problem: the Rose/Gasol pick-and-pop.
In Game 1, the distance between the closest Cavalier defender and Gasol wasn't within Jordan Spieth's putting range. Gasol made eight of his nine uncontested shots, according to SportVU, while he was 2-of-7 when contested. The idea that he would be that open, over and over, is unacceptable, even if due entirely to poor defensive execution. It's even more unfathomable that it would be by design.
And yet, that's what some players suggested afterward.
That it was at least partly intentional.
"We think we can do a better job than letting Pau have that much space," Shumpert said. "We tested him and he showed us he can knock that down."
James said something along the same lines.
"Obviously they were exploiting us with our coverage," James said. "That was the coverage we were in. They exploited us. We’ll get better with it. We’ll come in (Tuesday), we’ll watch film, we’ll see ways we can take that away or you make it a little bit more challenging. Obviously Pau is a great mid-range shooter. That we found out tonight. He made us pay. So, we have to go back to the drawing board and see ways that we can be better with that particular play when Pau is popping to the elbow and making those shots."
All the Cavaliers needed to do was pop over to the NBA stats site, and they could have seen the folly of daring Gasol from mid-range. This season, he shot 46.8 percent from 15 to 19 feet, comparable to other high-volume stretch bigs like Bosh (46.7), LaMarcus Aldridge (42.6), David West (48.9) and Al Horford (50.2). You don't test him without taking some lumps.
As Rose said, a free-throw area jumper for Gasol "is like a layup."
"It's an easy play," Rose said.
Especially with no one around.
What happened?
"We did adjust to that, but just a little late," Blatt said. "A little late."
It's not too late in the series, not with another home game upcoming, not with James and Irving on his side, not with James' history of losing Game 1 to the Bulls and sweeping from there.
Even so, it will be soon, if Blatt can't find something that sticks.
Ethan Skolnick covers the NBA for Bleacher Report and is a co-host of NBA Sunday Tip, 9-11 a.m. ET on SiriusXM Bleacher Report Radio. Follow him on Twitter, @EthanJSkolnick.
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