The Cavaliers once again showed us who they were as they were steamrolled in the second-half to drop Game 4 112-89.
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Maybe the collapse against the New York Knicks was justifiable at the time. The Cleveland Cavaliers weren’t ready for the moment and folded pretty quickly against a veteran team with more experience.
That benefit of the doubt is completely gone after performing like this in two games against a team they hand-picked. The Cavaliers are screaming at us who they really are. We just need to listen.
The Cavaliers controlled Games 1 and 2, but they did so on the defensive end. They forced Orlando’s shooters to make shots, and they simply couldn’t. Cleveland scraped by with just enough offense to secure the victories, thanks to big first halves from Donovan Mitchell.
Jahmal Mosley and the Orlando Magic found
something at the end of Game 2. They blitzed Mitchell and put their best defender, Jalen Suggs, on him. Both were moves Mosley should’ve made from the start.
Mitchell did an excellent job of handling this in the first half by reading and reacting to the defense. He carved up Orlando’s defense by quickly getting the ball out to the bigs before the trap got there.
And when he accepted the trap, he could find angles to get it to Cavaliers big man Jarret Allen with great passes like this.
Mitchell saved the Cavaliers early on. He and Allen and Evan Mobley combined for 46 of the team’s 60 first-half points. The Cavaliers scored 14 points outside those three in 6-15 shootings. Cleveland’s nine-point lead going into the break was because of them.
This team goes as Mitchell does. He struggled in the third quarter as he went 0-4 from the field with three turnovers. Allen and Mobley’s offensive game relies on the guards to be good. When Mitchell wasn’t, no one else stepped up in the slightest, including Darius Garland, who finished with 14 points on 5-14 shooting. This all snowballed as the team was dismantled with a 31-5 run in the third.
Their collapse highlighted the issues that have been there for the last two seasons. The fit between the undersized backcourt and the oversized frontcourt is clunky. When one breaks down, the other magnifies how badly things have fallen apart. We saw that in the third quarter as the already cramped court got even smaller.
Orlando’s guards could pressure the ball as soon as it crossed halfcourt without fear of shooters or the bigs beating them off the dribble. This shut off the offense, and everything else crumbled.
The off-season acquisitions meant to help the Cavaliers’ lack of shooting were again missing in action. Max Strus and Georges Niang have combined to go 4-28 (14.3%) in this series. At least the guys they replaced in the rotation from the last playoffs provided something on the defensive end. The same can’t be said for this duo after Game 4.
This has led Cleveland to shoot a playoff-worst 26.7% from a distance. In Game 4, they stopped shooting altogether, as Cleveland only made 17 threes. This is a far cry from the team that was putting up 40+ triples a game during their best stretch in the regular season.
The series is still up for grabs. It’s now a best-of-three series, with two of those games coming at Cleveland, a place they’ve proven to be better. That, and the Cavaliers being the more talented team, could allow them to still get past the first round.
However, these two performances in Orlando emphatically show that they’re missing something intangible that will keep them from reaching their full potential.
The soft label gets thrown around too easily in sports, especially with the Cavaliers. They didn’t fold because the Magic were too physical, which was not the only issue against the Knicks. There is, however, an unquantifiable factor that can often decide playoff series. The Cavaliers have repeatedly shown that they don’t have it. If they did, things like this wouldn’t happen.
