The Cavs Defensive Woes are Real, and Easily Traced
David Blatt laid a defensive foundation that Tyronn Lue has quickly destroyed
On January 22, 2016, the Cleveland Cavaliers sat atop the Eastern Conference. They were three games ahead of the second-place Raptors, had far and away the best point differential in the East, and had the fourth-best differential in the league.
We all know what happened next. The team somewhat inexplicably fired head coach David Blatt, promoted assistant Tyronn Lue, ran through the Eastern Conference, and brought the first ever championship to Quicken Loans Arena in a thrilling NBA Finals comeback.
It was a feel-good story. But the honeymoon has ended. While the Cavs find themselves once more atop the Eastern conference, they’re only one game ahead of the surging Celtics, and they’re locked in a three-way tie with the Raptors and Jazz for the fourth-best differential in the league. They’re the prohibitive favorites in a weak conference, but there’s no escaping the fact that the team has very real problems that must be fixed if they plan on being the first repeat champions since . . . well . . . the other LeBron team that did it.
Lue’s Defense Simply Isn’t There
The Cavaliers are bad at defense. There’s no sugar coating it. They are 22nd in the league with a paltry 107.7 defensive rating, the worst number in the league for a team above .500.
As a member of Blatt’s staff, Lue was the team’s defensive coordinator, yet it’s looking more and more like a misnomer. Presumably a defensive coach taking over head coaching duties would improve a team’s defensive prospects, or at least maintain them, but Lue’s promotion — and, more importantly, Blatt’s removal — has had the opposite effect.
At the halfway point of the 2015–16 season — the point at which Blatt was fired — the Cavs were fifth in the league with a defensive rating of 99.7, only 0.7 points worse than the defensively brilliant Warriors. In the second half of the season their defense tumbled to 12th in the league, with a dramatically worse rating of 104.8.
Throw in further regression this year, and things look pretty ugly for Lue and his defense. We now have a decent sample size — nearly a year and a half — for both coaches, and the results are dramatic. The team is rapidly moving backwards defensively, and hasn’t improved enough offensively to make up for it.
This isn’t Entirely Unexpected
The narrative surrounding Cleveland is that the team is cruising through the regular season, and will ramp up the defense once the postseason beigns. There is some precedent here: defending champions tend to take a step backwards defensively as they ease off the gas through the first 82 games. The Warriors went from first in the league with a 98.2 rating during their championship run, to fourth, with a 100.9 rating last year. The Heat rode a 97.1 rating (fourth-best in the league) to their first title, then dropped to 100.5 (seventh-best) for their second title, before dipping to 102.9 (11th-best) in LeBron’s final year in South Beach.
Some people have pointed to the Cavs improved defensive rating in the playoffs last year, when they had a rating of 103.5, but it’s not worth putting much stock in, as their opponents scored notably fewer second-chance points (despite a nearly identical defensive rebounding rate), and points off turnovers (which speaks more to Cleveland’s offense). Add it all up, and Cleveland’s defensive improvement in the postseason looks more like noise and variance than anything else.
It’s Not Likely to Improve
While the Cavs offense will almost surely improve in the playoffs, it seems unlikely that their defense will. In the playoffs, the game slows down, and coaches attack specific mismatches. In an increasingly point guard-driven league, Kyrie Irving is the second-worst starting PG in the league, defensively speaking, and will have his hands full with a postseason that currently projects to pit him against Goran Dragic, Kyle Lowry, Isaiah Thomas, and Steph Curry. Opposing coaches will attack those mismatches time and time again.
The problem isn’t just that Kyrie can be beat one-on-one, it’s that he can be beaten so easily that his teammates don’t have time to help out, and end up in no-man’s land, neither helping Irving, nor staying attached to their own player. Here’s Gary Harris driving by Irving without even putting a move on him:
Harris gets by Irving so quickly (it’s like a layup line!) that Kevin Love has no time to get into proper position. Harris could have tried to finish the play himself, and would have ended up with either a high-percentage shot, or a pair of free throws. Instead, he notes that Love came detached from Mason Plumlee too late for any further rotation, and feeds the big man for an even higher-percentage shot.
Even if Lue adjusts to counter those mismatches (more on that later), opposing coaches will simply run the pick and roll, then hit the “replay” button time and time again. The Cavs are 28th in the league this year defending the PNR ball-handler, allowing 0.91 points per possession. Against the PNR roll man, they allow 1.10 points per possession, also good for 28th in the league. Barring a magical resurgence from Larry Sanders, the Cavs don’t have the resources necessary to improve here. Tristan Thompson may be a strong help defender, but he constantly gets lost in space defending the PNR, and is not adept when he gets switched onto a guard. The Cavs’ help defense is non-existent, meaning that a giant hole is left in the paint anytime Thompson wanders out of it. And Irving defending the PNR looks more like a drunk football player doing cone drills than a basketball player playing defense.
Even on simplified offensive sets, the Cavs simply don’t know what to do.
Here, neither LeBron nor Thompson wants to pop out on the shooter. They not only display a hesitance to stray far from the basket, but neither player is at all aware of what the other is doing. Watch a few Cavs’ defensive possessions, and it becomes clear that this is because the team doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be doing in these scenarios.
The Cavs defense this season can be summed up right here:
The Nuggets have their PG set a screen for a perimeter player. In theory, this should be easy for Cleveland to defend: LeBron and Kyrie can switch without creating a matchup nightmare, or LeBron can fight through the half-assed screen of someone half his size. Kyrie does the former; LeBron does the latter. JR Smith, perhaps sensing such a disaster, wanders deep into the lane, then tries to help on the unguarded screener, even though he’d be late getting there if the Nuggets reversed the ball. That leaves the best shooter on the floor literally 15 feet away from any defender.
Chaos.
Where There’s Still Hope
Despite this, there are still a few ways that the Cavs can improve defensively when the games matter most. Rotations get shortened during the playoffs, meaning there will be more minutes for the Cavs’ better defenders, and fewer minutes for their weaker links.
Lue can also improve the team’s defense by playing smaller. Channing Frye and Derrick Williams have been sieves defensively (no surprises there), while the on-off numbers suggest that Richard Jefferson has been having something of a defensive resurgence. When the Cavs put Love or Thompson on the bench, it would behoove them to play LeBron at the 4, and Jefferson at the 3, to both improve their defensive chances, and create more mismatches on the offensive end.
There’s also a narrative floating around that LeBron is a dramatically better defender during the postseason, but, 2016 NBA Finals notwithstanding, there’s no statistical evidence to back this up. At this point, LeBron is who he is: a very talented and diverse defensive player with enough miles on the odometer that he’s not quite at the level of the Draymonds and Kawhis of the world.
Cleveland’s best chance defensively is to get creative with their assignments. Irving is the worst defender in their starting lineup, and they’ll have to find ways to hide him. If they play Washington, they should put LeBron on Kyrie’s man, John Wall, and move Irving onto Otto Porter Jr. That’s a massive mismatch for the Wizards, but every shot that Porter takes is one that Wall or Bradley Beal doesn’t. You can live with mismatches when they take the ball away from your opponent’s best scorers.
Against Toronto, the Cavs should again move Kyrie to the 3, and dare the Raptors to move the ball through DeMarre Carroll. They would likely start LeBron on DeMar DeRozan in this scenario, but it actually makes more sense to have him take on pick-and-roll master Kyle Lowry, and force Toronto to try and win a seven-game series with DeRozan isolations, which are not nearly as efficient as Lowry-led PNRs
If the Cavs end up in the conference finals against Boston, it would again make since to put LeBron on Kyrie’s counterpart. Between his defensive skills and massive size advantage, LeBron could make life miserable for Isaiah Thomas, who is the motor, steering wheel, and tires of the Celtics’ offense. Irving stands a decent chance to stay connected with Avery Bradley, as long as Lue is comfortable with Kyrie abandoning playing help defense (which he pretty much does anyway).
There’s no telling what would have happened had the Cavs retained David Blatt. The reports suggested that LeBron was undermining his coach’s authority, and the team had lost trust and respect for their sideline leader. Through a combination of added motivation, leadership change, luck, and superhuman performances, the Cavs achieved the ultimate goal, and won the championship. If they could go back and undo the change, they wouldn’t.
But the success of the past doesn’t change the prospects of the future. Whatever intangibles Lue may have brought to the table by representing change are no longer important, and his ability to coach a basketball team is now all that matters, and the early returns are troublesome.
The man that turned the Cavaliers into a defensive stalwart is now roaming the sidelines in Turkey, while the man they replaced him with is staring down an increasingly towering mountain that he seems wholly unfit to climb.
