Cavs / Warriors: Bazooka Point

The Cavs continued their win streak last night by scraping out a 6-point victory against an undermanned Golden State team. In an attempt to avoid the usual bullet point trope, though, I’m going to try out something new, which is to just pick out one big point about the game and focus the entire “game recap” post on that (you know us, always trying to be different).

Considering the Cavs’ defensive identity during the Mike Brown era, the win over GSW is still a little troubling to me. It continues what’s looking more and more like a continued trend of beating opponents via offensive volume rather than defensive lockdown.

Obviously, getting the win is the most important thing about any game. But the Cavs’ normally suffocating D has looked porous time and time again in the young 2009-10 season. So after allowing the Warriors to crack the 100 point barrier tonight, I decided to try to figure out who was more responsible: the Cavs’ defense, or the Warriors’ offense.

To elaborate a little, new NBA TV analyst Kevin McHale talked about the effect of playing a run-and-gun team like the Warriors. From his days as a player, McHale remembered that facing off against an opponent like this (see: one that plays almost no defense whatsoever) allows a team to be almost tricked into playing a style of basketball that’s not to their advantage.

This is a point that comes up all the time in playoff basketball, especially when teams with opposite styles play one another:  which team is going to dictate the pace of the game?   Normally, whichever team does this ends up winning, because “dictating pace” essentially means playing in a way that emphasizes your own strengths while taking away the opponents’ strengths.

So for the Cavs to dominate last night’s game, they should’ve tried to slow down the Warriors as much as possible by playing really physical D, limit them to one shot, and then on the offensive side, exploit mismatches by working the ball into the paint, using ball movement to break down the Warriors’ token attempts at defending, and pound the glass by being as physical as possible.  

But when it was all said and done, the Cavs had given up 108 points on 88 shots, were outrebounded 37-34, tied the Warriors in assists with 24, lost the turnover battle by 2, and shot 5 fewer FTs than the Warriors.

In short, it looks more like they played the Warriors’ game than vice versa.

But how different is this than what’s happened to the other 9 teams that have played Golden State this year?

The Warriors are now 3-7. Following are the scores to all 10 games. After each score, I’ve listed the opposing team’s season averages for points scored and opponent’s points per game.

HOU 108
GSW 107
HOU ppg: 103.4
HOU opp ppg: 100.3

PHX 123
GSW 101
PHX ppg: 110.4
PHX opp ppg: 106.5

GSW 113
MEM 105
MEM ppg: 99.6
MEM opp ppg: 108.7

LAC 118
GSW 90
LAC ppg: 96.2
LAC opp ppg: 99.5

SAC 120
GSW 107
SAC ppg: 104.6
SAC opp ppg: 105.0

GSW 146
MIN 105
MIN ppg: 90.2
MIN opp ppg: 104.0

IND 108
GSW 94
IND ppg: 101.3
IND opp ppg: 100.0

GSW 121
NYK 107
NYK ppg: 100.5
NYK opp ppg: 110.2

MIL 129
GSW 125
MIL ppg: 100.3
MIL opp ppg: 96.0

CLE 114
GSW 108
CLE ppg: 98.1
CLE opp ppg: 92.9

So of the 10 teams that Golden State has played so far this season, only three of them — the Pacers, the Clippers, and the Suns — have held the Warriors under that team’s average amount of opponent points for 2009-10. In all cases, the Warriors have provoked their opponent to score more than their usual team average, even when Golden State has ultimately won the game.

What this suggests, then, is that the Cavs are not at any kind of unique fault in allowing themselves to play Golden State’s style. In fact, almost everyone in the league so far has fallen into the Warriors’ trap to some extent. I also suspect it’s not a coincidence that one of the teams that held GSW below their opponent’s average ppg was Phoenix — a team bred to outplay the Warriors at their own style.

In other words, the numbers would suggest that last night’s game was less a symptom of who the Cavs are than who they were playing.

A few caveats exist here.  First, this is far from a rigorous statistical analysis. It doesn’t take into account shooting percentage or number of shot attempts, which would illustrate more in-depth just how the Warriors are influencing their opponents to both score more and be scored on more. 

Second, it’s really hard for me to applaud the Cavs — who are a much better led team than the Warriors — for making what is essentially the average response to Golden State. I told Mike during the course of the game that what I really would’ve loved would have been for the Cavs to come out and say, “OK, these guys are the highest-scoring team in the NBA. Let’s hold them to 85 points.”  But that’s not what happened.

However, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that Shaq and Andy were inactive for the game, and Jamario was injured early in the second half and didn’t return. That took 3 of our best rebounders and two of our most physical players out of the equation, and maybe things would’ve looked very different if they were to play even limited minutes.

Still, after all of this, the best I can do is give the Cavs a pass for this game. I’m comforted a little by the fact that they weren’t one of only a handful of teams to let Golden State dictate the pace, but I’m also disappointed that they didn’t separate themselves from the pack by imposing their will in a more pronounced way and really making an example out of the Warriors.

Final thought: Golden State plays Boston tonight. For reference, the Celtics are scoring an average of 98.5 ppg and giving up an average of 88.3 ppg this year. Keep those numbers in mind as you’re watching the score to that game at the bottom of the Cavs-Wizards contest. Should be an interesting benchmark for how the Cavs measure up to the team that I still hear all the analysts calling “the class of the East,” even after losing both nights of a back-to-back this weekend.

-T