2023-24 Regular Season Thread II: March Toward Destiny

[Futuredome]

Hearing rumblings of a huge announcement coming tomorrow...

He gone???

 

[MattyIce8]

Rip the band-aide off and fire the coach if it’s a toxic situation

 

[Soar]

I've been around awhile and been watching Cavs games way before I joined this board...

But I have to genuinely admit...

I just cannot get invested in this team this year.

Just feels like a lost, demoralizing, rudderless year. Weird because of how much talent this team has and objectively they have had some level of success. This isn't a Samardo Samuels and Manny Harris year.

But just feels like a team walking around in circles... you're getting somewhere (technically) but you're never really getting somewhere better.

 

[Cement]

 

[bushwick_bill]

DENVER — Given everything else that transpired over these last 31 days, Sunday’s no-show was, in many ways, a fitting capper to an ugly month.


The Cavs — a team that entered the season with a belief that they could do something special — got outclassed by the reigning champion Denver Nuggets, 130-101.

“We’ve got to play better,” star guard Donovan Mitchell said following the loss. “No other excuse to it. We’ve got to play better. No other way around it. It’s on all of us. Starts with me. But we have to play better. Simply put. We’ve shown we can do it and that’s what is frustrating. Not like we don’t have the capability to do it. That’s a championship-level team without their second-best player. Credit to them. They executed well and they have guys who have won rings and been there, but if we want to be that, a 29-point loss ain’t it.”

Mitchell isn’t typically so grim. Even during an uneven start to the season, with the Cavs needing about three weeks to creep over the .500 mark, Mitchell remained optimistic, repeatedly pointing to the calendar and expressing confidence that they would turn it around. He said if the Cavs were still stumbling with the playoffs approaching, it would be troublesome.



Well, here they are.



Weeks away from the postseason. Coming off their worst month. A glut of unanswered questions. Countless red flags. An unprecedented midseason surge that suddenly feels more like a mirage.



“I told you at the beginning of the season, if we had these struggles at this point then it’s a problem,” Mitchell said, referencing an early-November conversation in Oklahoma City after Cleveland dropped to 3-5. “It can’t happen. I can say all this now. We have to find a way to figure it out. It’s not going to linger after tonight. Have to watch the film and get back to what we do. But it can’t happen. We can all point to s---. It’s April. It’s (expletive) April. We’ve got to figure it out. And we will.”

Sunday was Cleveland’s 13th double-digit loss this season. Nearly half of those were in March — a hellish month in which the Cavs went just 7-10. Suddenly, they are clinging to the third spot in the Eastern Conference. The Knicks are a half game back while upstart Orlando is only a game and a half behind.



For now, forget the standings. The Cavs have more pressing matters. Mitchell’s health is at the top of that lengthy list.



Sunday was his second game back following a two-week absence caused by both a nasal fracture that has him wearing a black protective mask and a still-bothersome knee that not only required a platelet-rich-plasma ejection but has led to him limping across the finish line.



Mitchell isn’t himself. He is clearly laboring. At this point, it’s fair to wonder whether he will get back to the MVP form he showed earlier this season, the standard of play the Cavs need to remain competitive.



“I’m working back into it. That’s natural. I’m not worried about it. Just continue to build the reps and build the mental confidence in it,” Mitchell said when asked if he was playing at less than full strength. “At the end of the day I’m fine. I have to play better. We all have to play better. I’m not going to sit here and point to that. Everybody else is going to look at it like that. But it’s April. Gotta be better.”

When asked by cleveland.com whether it would be more beneficial to play through the knee issue and rebuild strength with on-court reps or take extra time to rest and recover, Mitchell smirked before sidestepping the question.



“I’ve got to be better,” he reiterated.



Mitchell’s facial expression said it all. Time is running out. He’s trying to balance health and rhythm. He clearly needs more recovery time. But meaningful game reps are of the utmost importance as well. Plus, the free-falling Cavs can’t afford to drop much further in the standings.



There’s not an easy answer.



“It’s a conversation we will have to have,” Bickerstaff said when asked about the possibility of periodically sitting Mitchell over the final few weeks. “It’s a tough balance. I know he wants to play and be out there with his teammates and we just have to work around it to figure out both sides of it so he’s getting the best and the team is getting the best as well. Those are conversations we will have. But we have not had any kind of conversations about him sitting out at this point.”

Since the All-Star break — a stretch coinciding with Mitchell being available for just over 200 total minutes — the Cavs rank 21st in offensive rating, 22nd in defensive rating and 23rd in net rating.



“You have to put stock into it,” Jarrett Allen said of those rankings. “That’s quite a few games. Can’t call them all bluffs. This is the team we are and the players we have so we just have to figure out a way to get back to where we were.”



Lacking the usual explosiveness, burst, change of direction and lift, Mitchell is averaging just 16.9 points on 37.1% from the field and 42.9% from 3-point range to go with 5.0 assists and 3.7 rebounds. In these seven atypical games, Mitchell has hit the 20-point mark just once, something he was doing routinely over the first few months.



He still isn’t beating defenders off the dribble. He can’t consistently get into the paint — and is struggling to finish around the rim in the rare instances when he does. He isn’t creating the usual separation on his step-back jumpers. Many of his attempts are coming up short.



In the season’s second half, 56 of Mitchell’s 97 attempts are from 3-point range. That’s around 58% of his total shots. In the first half that number was nearly 44%. He has taken just 12 total shots inside the restricted area. Only made four of them. Six have been blocked.

It all points to a limited star. Mitchell’s ineffectiveness has played a key role in Cleveland’s unsteady month, wrapping up a depleted March Sunday without winning back-to-back games.



“All those things are circumstantial,” Bickerstaff explained. “You go through a stretch when four of your top eight or nine players are out and it’s hard to be at your best. I give the guys credit who were out there and continued to fight and did the right things that we needed to do. But health is so important in our business. Out aim in these last seven or eight games is to get healthy. We know what we are capable of. We know what our guys are capable of as individuals and as a team.”



Max Strus, who missed a large chunk of March, is back, creating havoc with his non-stop offensive movement. Evan Mobley hasn’t had any trouble getting reacclimated following an ankle sprain that cause a nine-game absence. While Cleveland is still without injured do-it-all forward Dean Wade because of a sprained knee and rugged defensive stopped Isaac Okoro didn’t play Sunday because of a sore big toe, Mitchell is the Cavs’ barometer.


When he’s great, so are they. When he’s not, well ...



There are only a handful of games left for the Cavs — and Mitchell — to get right. Is that enough time or should there be a level of concern as the calendar flips to April?



“I would say it’s more so of a mindset of let’s figure it out as opposed to concern,” Mitchell said. “I think concern breeds anxiety and stress. I don’t think we are at that point. I don’t want to go like, ‘Oh we’re panicking.’ We’re not there. I think it’s just we have to figure it out and we have the capability to do it. I have the utmost confidence in our group and everybody to do that.”

 

[bushwick_bill]

 

[Sebastian]

Just another metric on Mitchell playing larger than his height, which here is below his listed height.

He is a prominent outlier.

 

[Pierre Pan]

The most recent transcription of the Wine and Gold podcast with some friendly banter and information contained in Fedor’s article omitted :

Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Read the automated transcript of today’s podcast below. Because it’s a computer-generated transcript, it may contain errors and misspellings.


Ethan Sands


What up Cavs Nation, I’m your host Ethan Sands and I’m back with another episode of the Wine and Gold Talk Podcast. I’m joined by your favorite beat reporter, Chris Fidor. What up Chris!

Ethan Sands

Yeah, and we obviously always talk about the ramp up period that is necessary for a guy to come back When he’s just recovering from an injury and obviously this is not just one injury for Donovan Mitchell It’s the nasal fracture on top of an ailing knee injury and obviously the knee injury has been what has held him out longer He was out for seven games for the knee injury and he’s been out for six gamesSands (08:50.206)

ffor the nasal fracture and the knee injury. It’s just been a complicated situation for him. And him scoring 13 points and six assists on three of 12 shooting while turning the ball over twice in the game against the Nuggets. And then 12 points, eight assists, three rebounds and two steals on four of 13.

So he has only, he’s shooting like 27% since he’s gotten back. And that’s not Donovan Mitchell. We know him to be efficient. We know him to put up shots and make them like, that’s indicative of what this team builds around. And because he is the engine that gets them going, especially on the offensive end, to see him not be able to shine and then the players around him not step up.

It’s something that we have to monitor going forward because if Donovan is not going to be himself for the rest of the season, there is more weight on everybody else because, obviously, Donovan Mitchell does take eyes off of those players. So he needs them to up their productivity up for the Cavs team to be successful. It’s like, it’s just so much that Donovan brings to the table on a nightly basis that even when we were talking to Nick Nersch before the 76ers game, he said that Donovan’s the guy that you have to have multiple schemes for, and the entire scheme changes whether he’s in the lineup or not. And because he was in the lineup on Friday, the Philadelphia 76ers had to change their entire game plan, and you saw that with how they were moving around and switching defenses and things of that nature.

But the Nuggets who are more capable and actually have their primary defenders on the court other than Jamal Murray tonight, it was just to showcase that there are different levels to the caliber of teams that the Cavs are facing and especially during this now four game roadstrip that they have for the rest of the road trip, these are teams that will give them problems, that will show them defensive fortitude and will something that the Cavs have not had to deal with for a majority of the season especially when they were having the most success against lesser opponents. So this is a test not only for where the Cavs are gonna end up seeding wise for the playoffs but it’s also how are they going to fare in the postseason if the Cavs don’t have Donovan Mitchell at 100%, don’t have Dean Wade at 100%, are these guys going to need to be able to get through that first round because we all know that that’s what we’ve said all year that the first round playoff series is how this season is going to be judged.


Chris Fedor

Well, we know the answer to that question, Ethan. I think we’ve seen enough evidence of it. The Cavs cannot function the same way offensively or defensively when Donovan Mitchell is off the floor and they can’t function the same way at both ends when he’s limited in any capacity because so much of their offense is driven by Donovan. So much of their offense is tied to him breaking the paint, collapsing a defense, looking for those driving kicks. You know, tonight he could not break down his defender not get into the paint. He had to settle for a lot of outside shots just the way that he has had to since the All-Star break and because of that the Cavs couldn’t get open looks. Maxters got two threes, Darius Garland got a three pointer. The Cavs lost the three point battle to Denver Nuggets by 39 points.

Think about that. Minus 39, 25 of Cleveland’s 82 shot attempts came from beyond the arc because they just couldn’t create enough of those on the offensive end of the floor because Donovan was limited because Darius wasn’t effective and they had to go a different direction in terms of their offense. They started using Evan Mobley more around the rim. They started using Jarrett Allen more in the pocket based on the way that Denver was guarding them and it became a math problem. 3s are still greater than 2s!

I mean, we definitely know that, but they just couldn’t generate enough of those because of what was going on with Donovan. And this has been a consistent thing that we have seen since the All-Star break. And I just don’t know, like, what the answer is to the Cavs generating the same kind of offense that they were able to generate in those six weeks when Donovan was running the show, when Donovan was playing at an MVP level, when they were one of the most prolific three-point shooting teams in the NBA because all eyes were on Donovan because the defense was so focused on him that created other opportunities for his teammate but if he can’t get into the paint consistently if he can’t consistently collapse the defense the Cavs just aren’t good enough to generate those same quality looks and if you look at Donovan in the way that he’s playing

In the season second half, Ethan, 56 of his 97 attempts are from three-point range. That’s about 58% of his shot profile. Alright, in the first half of that season, that number was 44%. He has taken, since he came back from the All-Star break, he has taken just 12 total shots inside the restricted area. 12 total!

He’s only made four of them and six have been blocked. So even when he gets into the paint, he’s not finishing around the rim because he doesn’t have the same explosiveness or lift or those shots are a little bit more contested around the rim because he’s not creating as much separation on those potential blow-bys. So this version of Donovan Mitchell, if this is what shows up in the playoffs, the Cavs are one and done. It’s that simple. I don’t mean to sound like doomsday, but I can only go based on the evidence in front of me. And if Donovan is less than 100%, the Cavs are not going to be able to win a seven game series either Indiana or Miami or even Orlando because we believe even at full strength or close to full strength that the Cavs are going to be in a battle in the first round because of how good the Eastern Conference is because of how difficult that first round matchup could be for the Cavs. Now you enter in a possibility not saying that that’s going to be the case but a possibility that Donovan is not going to be at the same level that he has been for much of this season, at least in the first half of the season, now you’re talking about a team that’s just average, below average. I just don’t think they’re going to be able to compete on a consistent basis like this.


Ethan Sands

Yeah, and I think with Donovan’s productivity going down and him not being that same player, it puts a spotlight on all the other players that are not stepping up. I mean, Evan Mobley was 9 of 10, and the only miss was when he took a shot from 3-point range, and he had 23 points on the night, but I still feel like I wanted more from him, like on the offensive end. And then you look at Darius Garland and everybody has been hating Darius Garland for the last couple- Yeah, I mean, he was bad today particularly, but even when he’s had decent stretches, people have just been like, we expect more because you are getting the most money on this franchise. And I get it. And right now, it’s like, I think Darius always goes through this re-acclamation period of his own when Donovan comes back because he’s like, alright.


Chris Fedor

He was awful tonight.


Ethan Sands

Well, I don’t want to take too many shots because I got to leave shots for Donovan and I got to yada yada, but I’m like Dog you are You are you want to be an elite point guard you want to be an elite scorer? you have to be able to take shots like you see that the By the field goal was attempted the Cavs had 82 and the Nuggets had 87 So like it’s not like they outshot like not outshot. It’s not like they shot ton more than the Cavs did but they just shot them more efficiently and were getting them up like when they actually had The right look like there was no hesitation from the Denver Nuggets when they got an open look They were taking it and I think that’s another thing for this Cavs team is like there’s too much unselfish lit There’s too much unselfishness Because they are always all looking for the next play in the next best shot when opportune shots come for themselves. They don’t automatically take them and I think that’s what this team needs right now is if you are open and you need and you have a shot opportunity be a little bit selfish and understand that you are also capable of making those shots as well but Chris it’s It’s also apparent for the defensive end of the ball like they’re without their two best perimeter defenders in Dean Wade and Isaac Okoro and Isaac was out because his big toe and Dean Wade has been out for his because of his knee since he practiced at Rice University when they were at Houston. Like it’s been a long stretch without Dean and I didn’t know if you had any updates on that.


Chris Fedor

So I do, but before we get into that, I just want to address something when it comes to Donovan really quick. Because Ethan, a lot of people are wondering like, okay, if Donovan needs more time to rest and rehab his knee, why doesn’t he sit up? So I asked Donovan specifically in the locker room tonight. I said, is the best approach for your knee moving forward? He interrupted me once because he almost didn’t wanna answer it, but I followed up again. And I said, is the best approach for your knee moving forward to build it back up with live game reps or give it more time to rest and recover? He smirked at me as if to indicate he needs more time to rest and recover, but he understands the calendar. And then he said, I’ve got to be better. And then the interview ended.

So the sense that I get is that it is a difficult balance for Donovan and the Cavs and they’re trying to figure out the best possible approach. Um, JB Bickerstaff said after the game that those conversations to this point have not centered around Donovan sitting out at any point.

But JB admitted that it’s a conversation that he will have with the medical staff and he’ll have with Donovan and see what the best approach is. But like on one hand, Donovan does need those live game reps. He does need to build himself back up. He does need to get back into rhythm because that is going to help him going into the playoffs.

At the same time, like he needs rest and recovery because that is going to help his knee feel better going into the playoffs. So it’s like the two things that he needs right now are counterproductive. I just think he’s trying to figure out like, what is the best one? Or is this just the reality of that? Something I have to deal with.


Chris Fedor

Yeah, I just think he goes beyond that. I think he just needs to figure out like what his knee will allow him to do in this state and what it won’t. It’s like one thing to try all these moves and these different movements when he’s out there on the practice floor or he’s in pregame warmups, but he needs to see how that translates to a game situation, a meaningful game situation so that he’s not trying to figure all of those things out in the playoffs. When the pressure picks up, when the intensity is ratcheted up, when the defenses are better,

Everything is magnified and all of that kind of stuff. So it’s like these guys coming back from injury, Ethan, they need these kinds of reps before getting into playoff basketball. We’ve talked about this before. Isaac Okoro going from the sidelines, not being able to play into playoff basketball. Like that was tough on him. He didn’t feel like himself right away when he came back in that series. It took him a few games to get himself where he needs to be.

Donovan wants that process to be right now at the end of March in early April and The only way for that to happen is for him to be out there on the court It’s not for him to sit on the sidelines and rest look in some of these back-to-backs Coming up and the Cavs have a couple of them Maybe there are situations where Donovan sits down and he tries to give his knee a little bit more time But like the two things that he needs right now aren’t mutually possible. So it’s about figuring out what is best for him to get to a point where he can be the best version of himself or the best version of himself in this current state for this team to consistently compete. And you can tell that it’s a struggle. You can tell that it’s a struggle when it comes to him trying to figure it out and when it comes to the organization trying to figure it out because it’s just not an easy answer right now.

 

[shoes22]

I've been around awhile and been watching Cavs games way before I joined this board...

But I have to genuinely admit...

I just cannot get invested in this team this year.

Just feels like a lost, demoralizing, rudderless year. Weird because of how much talent this team has and objectively they have had some level of success. This isn't a Samardo Samuels and Manny Harris year.

But just feels like a team walking around in circles... you're getting somewhere (technically) but you're never really getting somewhere better.

Ehhh the issue largely seems to be health, no? If everyone was at 100% full health are we having this conversation? I doubt it. Like Mitchell is playing, but he's clearly not healthy.

 

[CleveRocks]

While Evans numbers were great, for some reason we are not the same team when he is on the floor. I don't understand what it is, but it's there.

When the rest of the team comes to play we defend and scrap , but last night the team gave up in the second half and pretty much mailed it in..

 

[guitarguy]

While Evans numbers were great, for some reason we are not the same team when he is on the floor. I don't understand what it is, but it's there.

When the rest of the team comes to play we defend and scrap , but last night the team gave up in the second half and pretty much mailed it in..

I feel like that's more of coincidence. Whatever the F is going on with Mitchell the last couple weeks has negatively impacted the team more than anything imo. Mobley seems to be one of the only trying to live beyond it.

 

[shoes22]

When the rest of the team comes to play we defend and scrap , but last night the team gave up in the second half and pretty much mailed it in..

What does this have to do with Mobley, though? Do players think that as long as Mobley is on the floor, they don't need to hustle, defend and rebound?

I didn't see anything wrong with how Mobley played yesterday, or how he's played the last few games for that matter. The guy is knocking down threes now for goodness sake, so people can't use the spacing excuse.

Everyone else needs to step it up around him.

 

[guitarguy]

Hearing rumblings of a huge announcement coming tomorrow...

Why did you have to say that?...I wanted to ignore the Cavs today. Ha.

 

[bobbyh]

Why did you have to say that?...I wanted to ignore the Cavs today. Ha.

It's April Fool's day, the absolute worst day of the year on social media imo, so I wouldn't believe anything that is posted today.

 

[bushwick_bill]