Super-ugly-broken-game. The loss highlighted a few things:
-The trouble with Delonte when he doesn’t produce (1-5 from the floor with no rebounds).
-The unfortunate absence of Jamario Moon, whose length and rebounding from the perimeter were missed, especially in light of Delonte’s largely empty minutes.
-The issue with turnovers.
Ultimately though, we saw the worst of the Cavaliers tonight … what happens when LeBron decides to stop moving the ball. This was the low assist offense’s time to shine.
One important number to watch every night is LeBron’s assists. It doesn’t always tell the tale of the game but sometimes it can - like tonight and the loss a few games back against Charlotte. Essentially, what we saw in both games was the offense shutting down while LeBron chose to attack and shoot jumpers.
In an overtime game, the Cavs had 4 assists less than their average.
LeBron also took 11 three pointers, 7 above his average. The number of shots he takes from behind the arc is another sometimes indicator of how well the offense is running.
This is really simple basketball. Moving the ball and moving bodies forces your opponent to work on defense, it leads to better shots, and it keeps players who are in the game active … so when it comes to playing defense, their minds and bodies are in the game. I though the Cavs really allowed Memphis to have it easy on defense. We’re talking, after all, about a team that was 29th in the league in defensive efficiency - and they held the Cavs to 44% shooting and 109 points in 53 minutes.
I can be pretty critical of LeBron when games like this happen, and it may not be fair, but it’s part of the price of greatness; consistency is its truest measuring stick.
Let’s go with a brief overview of LeBron’s stats this year: FG% is up, 3P % is down, FT% and FTA are down, TRB are down, AST are up, STL are down, BLK are down, and TO are up.
Essentially, LeBron is shooting the ball better (51% vs. 49%) and racking up more assists (8.4 vs. 7.2), but doing everything else worse.
We’re only 21 games in so far, but we’ll have to keep tracking this, especially when people start to compare LeBron’s season this year with his MVP season last year. We’d have to get into a prolonged discussion about what’s more important: FG%, rebounds, assists, etc. to really get into it, but for my money, LeBron is underperforming from what he did in ‘08-‘09 - then again, he was historically good last year, and it was going to be very hard to match those numbers again.
Having said that, no need to magnify one loss … and interestingly, Windhorst put a lot of the onus for the lack of ball movement on the Cavs trying to feed Shaq once Marc Gasol got his 4th foul … I don’t know - how the offense couldn’t force Gasol into fouling out is something I’m still wondering about - but elsewhere the Celtics pushed their winning streak to 8 games.
The Cavs play Houston on Wednesday night in Texas.
(view comments)
