Cavs head coach J.B. Bickerstaff. ESPN Cleveland/Rob Lorenzo
Game Night Observations: A bad matchup and a scheduled loss
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Danny Cunningham covers the Cleveland Cavaliers for 850 ESPN Cleveland and TheLandOnDemand.comThe NBA is often referred to as a “make-or-miss league” as a way of saying that sometimes it just isn’t a team’s night. That much was evident on Monday night for the Cleveland Cavaliers in their 100-88 loss to the Toronto Raptors on Monday night.
It wasn’t even that the Cavaliers played poorly against the Raptors so much as they missed open shots, ones that should be made more often than not, at that.
Nights like this happen in the NBA. In fact, it happened on Sunday night for the Cavs in Detroit, too. That night, the Cavs were able to turn it on against a lesser team late in the game and salvage a win. The same couldn’t be said Monday night in Toronto. Guard Darius Garland and big man Evan Mobley both finished with 18 points and no other member of the team reached double figures.
Being on the second night of a back-to-back certainly didn’t help things for the Cavs, but the effort didn’t look like a problem so much as the team just missed open shots far too often. When head coach J.B. Bickerstaff pulled his starters with just over six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter and the result no longer in question, the Cavs were shooting 36.4% from the floor for the night and 18.8% from beyond the arc. At one point, the Cavs missed 17 consecutive shots from 3-point range.
There’s really not a ton more to this game than that. As cruel as things can be at times in the NBA, sometimes teams can create good offense and miss open shots. That’s essentially what happened to the Cavs on Monday night.
There are games that can be looked at as learning experiences for teams, but this probably doesn’t qualify as one of them. The Cavs did plenty of things well, but the ball just didn’t find the bottom of the net all that often.
Sometimes, in the NBA, that’s just how it goes.
Matchup nightmare
There is something to be said about the way that the Toronto Raptors matchup with the Cavs. They’re two young, talented teams that are built in very different ways.
The Cavs have a star-studded backcourt and two All-Defense caliber big men. The Raptors have All-Star guard Fred VanVleet and seemingly every other player on the roster is 6-foot-8 and has a 7-foot-2 wingspan. It makes for a game of contrasting styles. Right now, it’s fair to say that the Cavs don’t matchup all that well against Toronto.
Just because that’s the case right now doesn’t mean it will be the case forever. There are a couple of ways to combat this.
For starters, in both losses to the Raptors this season, the Cavs haven’t played with a full team. In the first game, Darius Garland went down in the second quarter with an eye laceration and missed the next two weeks. On Monday, the Cavs were without Jarrett Allen, Kevin Love, and Lamar Stevens. The Raptors, despite not being fully healthy either, did get back both Scottie Barnes and Pascal Siakam from injuries for Monday’s game.
Part of matching up better with the Raptors could be just being fully healthy and having a better feel for playing together as a team for the Cavs, but it does expose the lack of depth on the wing for the Cavs. The Raptors completely ignored Isaac Okoro in the corner whenever he was on the offensive end of the floor, Cedi Osman is a very streaky player, and the same can be said for Caris LeVert.
That’s an issue that will likely be worth addressing when the trade season arrives in the NBA.
Schedule loss
With the Cavs down a significant part of their rotation and being on the second night of a back-to-back, this was going to be a difficult game to win for the Cavs, no matter how poor they shot the ball on open looks.
The game against the Raptors was the third game for the Cavs in four nights, with all three games taking place in different cities. Against a good team like Toronto, this was always going to be a tough one to pull out for Cleveland.This type of thing happens all the time in the NBA. On Sunday in Detroit the Cavs benefitted from a rest advantage over the Pistons. Monday in Toronto, they were on the other end of it. Typically, over the course of the NBA season, these things level out. In taking a big picture look at the schedule for the Cavs, they tend to have rest advantages over teams more often throughout the course of the season. In fact, the Cavaliers are tied for the fewest back-to-backs in the league, only have one instance of five games in seven nights, and have 12 games with a rest advantage compared to nine games with a rest disadvantage, according to NBAstuffer.com. Monday just happened to be one of those nights the Cavs were at a disadvantage.
The loss drops the Cavs to 13-8 on the season. They return to action on Wednesday at home against the Philadelphia 76ers.
