2023 NBA Playoffs 1st Round: Cavs vs. Knicks

macbdog said:

Lauri Markkanen, Ochai Ogbaji, 3 first rounders and 3 pick swaps for the opportunity to get bounced in the first round by the New York Bricks. I hope folks see this is the real Donovan Mitchell- a nice complimentary piece, a good player, but not a superstar. This team looks like they have no fucking clue on offense despite two All Star guards... It's ridiculous. And we can blame the coaches, they deserve some blame, but my god they can't turn marshmallows into marble. Donovan turns into a tolerable Kyrie when asked to lead the team, he knows Hero Ball and he's not good enough to do that and beat teams. LBJ could do that shit, he can't. He was supposed to be the vet to show them how to win in this environment.... Yet it looks now like he was part of the reason his Jazz teams also would bomb out come playoff time. Shocked... Shocked, I tell you! Hopefully he finds his basketball IQ again and his teammates find their balls and at least make the Knicks earn this series win.

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Dude Mitchel is one of the all time great playoffs performers, has one of the highest scoring averages in playoff history. Those Jazz teams lost because Gobert got gameplanned off the floor every post season

BigZ94 said:

Dude Mitchel is one of the all time great playoffs performers, has one of the highest scoring averages in playoff history. Those Jazz teams lost because Gobert got gameplanned off the floor every post season

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Gobert wasn't the only one being game planned. It looks like the game plan for Donovan is 'make him play Hero Ball, his teams offense will stagnate and you can beat them'. Watching Donovan fail to involve his big men in this series in all but 1 game means it wasn't just Gobert. Sorry.

macbdog said:

Gobert wasn't the only one being game planned. It looks like the game plan for Donovan is 'make him play Hero Ball, his teams offense will stagnate and you can beat them'. Watching Donovan fail to involve his big men in this series in all but 1 game means it wasn't just Gobert. Sorry.

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The offense wasn’t a problem in 2021 when they averaged 116 ppg in the playoffs, last year mitchel was injured. The issue was never their offense is was opposing teams spacing the floor and eliminating Goberts effectiveness.. and which big men did he fail to get involved? Hassan whiteside and Rudy Gobert 2 of the worst offensive big men in the league?

I agree Donovan has not involved the big men, but I attribute that also to our gameplan, and the fact that if you have 2 bigs that clog the paint there really isn’t that much you can do with them

Interesting that Vegas has us 5.5 point favorites for wednesdays game. Guess they have more faith in the Cavs than RCF does. We’ve been much better at home this year obviously.

This series may come down to game 6 at MSG…

cavsfever said:

This series may come down to game 6 at MSG…

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A must-win game, on the road, where these guys have scored the two lowest point totals of the NBA season?

JMoneyYourHoney said:

A must-win game, on the road, where these guys have scored the two lowest point totals of the NBA season?

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Obviously the odds would be against us but I’m saying there’s a chance…

And frankly if we have another stinker in game 6 that would say it all about this team. The NBA requires that you play on the road

cavsfever said:

Shit, written three weeks ago and this is turning out to be prophetic

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Yeah, wanted to wait for the series to be *officially* over, and I never wanted to be more wrong, but it’s funny seeing how things have transpired after I was assailed by all the homers for this prediction. I’d love to eat my words on this, but I’m not betting on it.

It’s also amusing, after being a fierce opponent of the DM trade from the moment of its inception, to seeing half the board now openly questioning whether or not it was the right move after all…

I believe JBB has mishandled this series. 2 things stand out to me. 1st - Series are largely won and lost by the stars. Thibs has simply done a much better job making our stars uncomfortable than we have theirs. Brunson, Randle and even Barrett have been far too comfortable. Outside of game 2, has anyone on our team looked similarly? 2nd - His bench rotation has been terrible. He’s been riding Cedi who is 2-13 from 3 over the last 3 games. With Cedi you give up defense and rebounding in hopes of an offensive spark. It hasn’t worked. Danny Green has made exactly 1 basket while giving up defense and rebounding. Okoro has gone 2-10 from 3 and only given us 6 rebounds the whole series. You know what Lamar and Wade would give us? Defense and rebounding - and there is no way they would have shot any worse. Unless JBB knows he’s hurt, there was no reason to not give Wade a chance in this series. The matchup with the Knicks was always going to require size and spacing. With Love gone, Wade is literally our only option for this. How can you at least not give it a chance to work? And if it didn’t work, let Lamar play. He will at least not get pushed around and battle on the boards. Randle has drawn Mobley out of the paint and Allen is getting the hell beat out of him as our only size in the middle. Give him some help! And what are they going to do - shoot worse from 3 than the 5-27 that the Okoro, Green and Cedi have produced?

Mobley leads the team in Net rating and differential per 100 possessions right now (excluding the garbage time game 2 guys), followed by Okoro. Those are the only two guys with a positive net rating.

Garland is even and Mitchell is negative, but bother still have a positive differential in their on/off.


The killer is Allen. Team is almost 5 points better than the Knicks with him OFF and over 5 points worse than the Knicks with him on.

I'm reducing his role drastically in game 5 if I don't see the fire and passion right away. 35 minutes is dropping to 20 and I'm running a fast lineup to make their slow bigs guard in space.

JMoneyYourHoney said:

Yeah, wanted to wait for the series to be *officially* over, and I never wanted to be more wrong, but it’s funny seeing how things have transpired after I was assailed by all the homers for this prediction. I’d love to eat my words on this, but I’m not betting on it.

It’s also amusing, after being a fierce opponent of the DM trade from the moment of its inception, to seeing half the board now openly questioning whether or not it was the right move after all…

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I had an immediate negative reaction to the trade but then argued myself into it, on the basis that DM was just really good especially in the playoffs and gave us an "instant offense" package that was critical given our offensive weaknesses last year. That's still true, but this series is so far giving us a lesson in the problems with relying on ISO instant offense against a smart defense.

The misgivings I always had was that it was premature -- we just didn't have a lineup that was contention-ready and was only missing an explosive SG to round it out. To answer that, people relied on A MIRACLE OCCURS and Mobley becomes a two-way first team all-NBA player within the three years of Mitchell's contract. Well, we're a long way from that miracle...Mobley is an all-NBA guy on defense but very far from it offensively and may never get there. But for all that people relied on internal growth of the squad to make the Mitchell trade make sense, we also lost a lot of our internal development and growth potential in the trade. Agbaji obviously, Markkanen took a developmental leap that we didn't benefit from, etc. We are kind of locked in to this team with little flexibility now.

Rich said:

The killer is Allen. Team is almost 5 points better than the Knicks with him OFF and over 5 points worse than the Knicks with him on.

I'm reducing his role drastically in game 5 if I don't see the fire and passion right away. 35 minutes is dropping to 20 and I'm running a fast lineup to make their slow bigs guard in space.

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Allen has been a huge disappointment - Robinson and Hartenstein have been pushing him around. He had only four rebounds in game 4 - hard to believe. He has no offensive game. He also had no blocks and a ton of layups were made on him. He's trying, but he has no offensive skills and appears slow and late on defense.

The guys in The Athletic video pointed out that on defense Allen has been drifting around following the ball, especially when Brunson has it. It looks like the Cavs expect Brunson to beat his man off the dribble and they want Allen there to stop the layup. Except Brunson isn't going to the rim - he's shooting mid-range jumpers so Allen is not in position to block the shot OR to block out Robinson or Hartensten, who are camped under the rim.

Allen is consistently in no-man's land on defense. He's not in position to effectively contest the shot OR get the rebound. JBB needs to make an adjustment. My theory is that JBB was so influenced by Brunson's 48-point game against the Cavs on March 30 that he doesn't think he can be stopped by one defender and he wants Allen to always be in position to pick him up.

It's tough to criticize when the Knicks are averaging under 100 points per game. But the film breakdown was pretty convincing. Turn it on at the 8:48 mark to see what they're talking about.

cavsfever said:

I had an immediate negative reaction to the trade but then argued myself into it, on the basis that DM was just really good especially in the playoffs and gave us an "instant offense" package that was critical given our offensive weaknesses last year. That's still true, but this series is so far giving us a lesson in the problems with relying on ISO instant offense against a smart defense.

The misgivings I always had was that it was premature -- we just didn't have a lineup that was contention-ready and was only missing an explosive SG to round it out. To answer that, people relied on A MIRACLE OCCURS and Mobley becomes a two-way first team all-NBA player within the three years of Mitchell's contract. Well, we're a long way from that miracle...Mobley is an all-NBA guy on defense but very far from it offensively and may never get there. But for all that people relied on internal growth of the squad to make the Mitchell trade make sense, we also lost a lot of our internal development and growth potential in the trade. Agbaji obviously, Markkanen took a developmental leap that we didn't benefit from, etc. We are kind of locked in to this team with little flexibility now.

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What I want to hear is Koby and Gansey offense philosophy. I'm not sure they have one. They have really put so much into finding a SG when it's not really a position that is a driving force in the NBA. Even if it wasn't intentional they have had Sexton, KPJ, Okoro, LeVert, and Mitchell fill the SG role and that's a massive amount of assets sunk into the position. All 5 are at least NBA rotational level players so it wasn't likely they were complete busts. Even Cedi and Clarkson are probably more natural SGs even if they play in other positions. They even drafted Ochai Agbaji who they even admitted was more of a SG than SF.

It's kind of nuts how much we have put into the position while not finding even a serviceable SF. They stumbled into Lauri at SF then trade him off.

Wham with the Right Hand said:

It's tough to criticize when the Knicks are averaging under 100 points per game. But the film breakdown was pretty convincing. Turn it on at the 8:48 mark to see what they're talking about.

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I thought that too (tough to criticize <100) but the points allowed are deceiving. Game yesterday was at a pace of 87 (!) so our defensive rating is 117.2 which is not great. Our season average was 110.6. Only GSW, Kings and Boston had a higher ratings than the Knicks yesterday.

Our season average offensive rating was 116.1 which was good for ninth, so 117.2 defensively is bottom ten, and usually it’s harder to score in the playoffs.

inliner311 said:

What I want to hear is Koby and Gansey offense philosophy. I'm not sure they have one. They have really put so much into finding a SG when it's not really a position that is a driving force in the NBA. Even if it wasn't intentional they have had Sexton, KPJ, Okoro, LeVert, and Mitchell fill the SG role and that's a massive amount of assets sunk into the position. All 5 are at least NBA rotational level players so it wasn't likely they were complete busts. Even Cedi and Clarkson are probably more natural SGs even if they play in other positions. They even drafted Ochai Agbaji who they even admitted was more of a SG than SF.

It's kind of nuts how much we have put into the position while not finding even a serviceable SF. They stumbled into Lauri at SF then trade him off.

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the offensive philosophy doesnt fall on Koby, it falls on JBB....

JBB is now a lifetime 2-9 as a headcoach in the playoffs and his teams have routinely struggled to score more than 100 points in those games.

the Cavs have a top 5-6 PG, and a top 2-3 SG, and are struggling to score. At some point you have to get to the obvious conclusion that the coach has no idea how to game plan on offense

I have a feeling we will come back and this will go to game 7