Here's a one-play summary of the Cleveland Cavaliers season: On Sunday, Halfway through the second quarter, with his team trailing the piece-of-shit Charlotte Hornets, Darius Garland navigated not so much around but rather into a Jarrett Allen screen, smacked into his teammate, fell over, and gave up a pick-six layup.
The Cavs are in a rather alarming place at the moment: 15-12, at the bottom of the seven-team heap separating third and ninth places in the Eastern Conference, staring down a few weeks without their most important defensive player. One game out of third is not an obviously disastrous situation, though for a team widely expected to play for the Eastern Conference title, scuffling that low while the Orlando Magic and Detroit Pistons cruise past is quite disappointing. The Los Angeles Clippers are probably the biggest disaster in the league right now, and the Sacramento Kings are playing the most aesthetically revolting hoops, so Cleveland's winning record at least keeps the Cavs from that level of scrutiny. But their place in the standings somehow oversells what the actual experience of watching them has been like.
The word with Cleveland is "malaise." The Cavaliers don't do anything at an extremely high level, other than stand around and watch Donovan Mitchell make magic. Things have been listless for a few weeks now, though it was not until the shambolic 119-111 home loss to the Hornets on Sunday that addressing the state of things finally became unavoidable. Fans showered their team with boos as the Cavs failed to score a single point in overtime. "We deserve it," Mitchell said. "I was a fan once. I would boo us, too."
The obvious first thing to address with the Cavs is their ever-worsening injury crisis. Last season, all four of Cleveland's foundational players played at least 71 regular-season games, but this year, Garland and Allen have missed significant time and looked worse when they have played. Evan Mobley, the aforementioned defensive linchpin, is about to miss two to four weeks with a calf strain. Max Strus has not played yet this season, Larry Nance Jr. is hurt, and things are strained enough that you really notice Sam Merrill's absence. Lonzo Ball is able to run and jump only intermittently. He is shooting 29 percent from the field. De'Andre Hunter is around. Nae'Qwan Tomlin is a critical piece right now.
But the nature and character of the Cavs' badness transcends health. They don't play particularly fast in the halfcourt, they don't get to the line as often as you'd like, and while they attempt threes at the third-highest rate in the league, they also shoot the third-worst percentage. Mobley has been particularly disappointing. He's a fine defender, but both his long-prophesied offensive leap and the oodles of free system buckets that leap would theoretically provide for the Cavs have been nowhere to be seen. He seems to take nothing but fallaways, leaners, and half-hooks that start as five-foot shots and leave his hand from eight. Mobley is tremendously skilled for a guy his size; the theory with him was always that he would be able to space the court with his credible shooting and then put it on the floor with enough skill and speed to punish rotating defenses and smaller defenders. In practice, though, Mobley doesn't play with a ton of pop.
Admittedly, I am holding him to a high standard here. He's posting 19 points and nine rebounds per game, nothing to sniff at, but the Cavs are running back a 64-win, second-apron team with serious title aspirations in a conference that lost two of its best five players (Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Haliburton) for the season to Achilles tears. The standards should be high. You only rarely feel Mobley out there as a genuine Problem; for now, he's just a really skilled seven-footer who can play modern defense at a super-high level.
Garland, whose permanently injured toe seems to be in pain all the time, is in a similar situation of just not registering as a Problem these days. I love his game, the passing, the speed, the creativity off the bounce, but that all depends on a quickness that isn't there right now, a quickness that it's fair to be skeptical of given his constant injuries.
When the Cavs lost to the Indiana Pacers and Boston Celtics in the second rounds of the past two playoffs, they were variously hurt and overmatched, though they have consistently been pushed around. Watch the Cavs play, and you will see a team that is set up to play the modern game—they play two bigs! They have multiple ballhandlers! They shoot a ton of threes!—but without one crucial element. But they don't bully anyone. After a brief hiatus, this has returned as an increasingly essential part of winning basketball games. Look at the top of the NBA standings right now. Each of the teams up there excels at beating the crap out of opponents. Cleveland never does.
What the Cavaliers do have going for them is Mitchell. He took the blame for the Hornets loss, though that speaks more to his great leadership than the actual quality of his game. Before losing to the Hornets, the Cavs had to rally back hard to beat the Washington Wizards by two. It took 48 points from Mitchell, with 24 in the fourth, to get over that hump, advancing a theme that's been present all year. Jaylon Tyson (another bright spot!) even said it after the loss: "I mean, at this point, it’s a repetitive—it’s the same thing. We get down by a lot and in the fourth quarter and we turn it on." It's not so much that Mitchell had a bad game against Charlotte, but that the Cavs cannot beat a team that stinks unless Mitchell goes crazy in every fourth quarter.
The Cavs need to start winning right now, because things are going to get more difficult soon. They have played five more home games than road games so far; after a four-game run against bottom-feeders, the rest of their stretch without Mobley will come against title contenders and also the Phoenix Suns, who punish the Cavs' sort of deficiencies more than perhaps any other team. Cleveland is aproned out, so there is no magic trade waiting to save them. This is who they are and who they'll have to win with.
