Danny Cunningham covers the Cleveland Cavaliers for 850 ESPN Cleveland and thelandondemand.com. He can be found on Twitter at @RealDCunningham.The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Chicago Bulls 97-89 on Saturday night at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse to run the team’s winning streak to six games.
What the Cavaliers dealt with this week – having to play five games in seven nights – is a really difficult task for any team. By the end of the week, the level of competition doesn’t matter all that much, it sort of can become the team playing against itself. The fifth game is almost always the second night of a back-to-back. For the Cavs it was, with the fourth game being a 10 p.m. Eastern Time start in New Orleans, the fifth game became even more difficult.
The team arrived back in Cleveland following the game against the Pelicans at approximately 4 a.m. on Saturday with many players likely not getting to bed until after 5 a.m. On top of that, the Cavaliers, as most teams across the league do, will hold a walkthrough on the floor a few hours before the game that takes place on the second night of a back-to-back. That wasn’t possible on Saturday due to a Cleveland Monsters game taking place during the afternoon.
Playing five games in seven nights is difficult no matter the circumstances, but that made it even more challenging for the Cavs.
“More difficult than I thought. I'm not going to lie to you,” center Jarrett Allen said of the stretch of games. “It was tough mentally having to prepare for every single game, having to make sure that your body was in peak shape and peak recovery for every game.”
All of those things are challenging for the Cavs, as they would be any team in the NBA. Fighting through it had to be done.
The Cavaliers did just that. It wasn’t a game that will be looked back upon as one of the team’s best performances. For much of the night things didn’t look great offensively and the team shot just 41.9 percent from the floor while making just one of the 17 corner 3-pointers that were attempted, according to Cleaning the Glass.
Cleveland used a strong close to the third quarter and a terrific start to the fourth quarter to find a way to win. The Cavs went from down 13 points with 6:49 left in the third quarter to up by 13 points with 3:44 left in the fourth quarter. That 26-point swing was the result of a 43-17 extended run by the Cavs.
One of the reasons the Cavs were able to make that push was the play of Donovan Mitchell, who had 19 of his game-high 29 points in the second half. Another reason was the lineup choice that head coach J.B. Bickerstaff made against the Bulls.
Lately, the rotation for the Cavs has been tight, and it was very tight in the second half on Saturday. In the third and fourth quarters the Cavs played just eight guys and spent some time playing four perimeter players and one big man.
In addition to Mitchell, the Cavs put Darius Garland, Ricky Rubio, and Caris LeVert on the floor all at once with either Jarrett Allen or Evan Mobley. There was also a stretch with Cedi Osman in for Garland that accomplished the same strategy.
Those two lineups outscored the Bulls 16-5 across seven minutes in the second half.
“Offensively, I just thought we were having a hard time getting it done,” Bickerstaff said on why he went to those groups. “So, you put a bunch of guys out there who can handle the ball, who can play make, and then just give them a ton of space. And I thought we were able to take advantage of it, create room for one another. And then give them credit, there were some size advantages on the other end, some mismatches there, but they fought and scrapped and I thought they were really good defensively as well.”
Mitchell’s healthThose groups were able to work so well for the Cavs because Mitchell was terrific again for them. It’s the second night in a row he was able to put up big numbers offensively, and he’s doing so while looking back to normal in terms of his explosiveness and burst.
“I think the biggest thing for me man, is just obviously I haven't been the same since, what was it, Minnesota, New Orleans, whatever game it was. So just trying to build and get back and I'm starting to find that again,” Mitchell said.
In addition to the eye test, the numbers support what Mitchell is saying. He hadn’t been playing his best basketball following the groin injury on Jan. 16 against New Orleans. Between then and Friday he had missed six games due to groin soreness and averaged just 16.2 points per game on 37.9 percent shooting from the floor and 32.1 percent from 3-point range.
In his last two games on Friday and Saturday, Mitchell has scored a combined 59 points while shooting 22-of-39 from the floor.
The one stat that may be most telling regarding Mitchell’s groin injury is how often he had been driving to the basket. According to NBA.com, Mitchell had been averaging 12.9 drives to the basket this season prior to his groin injury and he was shooting 60.6 percent on 6.3 attempts per game. From the injury until Friday night that number had dipped to just 8.6 drives per game and 56 percent shooting on 3.6 attempts.
On Friday night in New Orleans, Mitchell had 12 drives and made five of his six shot attempts. Saturday against the Bulls, Mitchell was 5-of-7 inside the restricted area (NBA’s tracking data was not available immediately following the game for this writing).
The burst Mitchell has or doesn’t have isn’t just something that’s noticeable to him. While the numbers support the fact that he was dealing with a groin issue, they’re not needed to know something wasn’t right with him physically.
“Yeah, I mean, you can feel it. You watch the elevation and the lift and his shot. And I can tell when he leaves the ground, whether it's going in or not,” Bickerstaff said. “And like the past couple games, you can feel that rhythm and feel that power. And you watch his release and everything and it seems to be back to normal.”
