Cleveland Cavaliers: Lessons from yet another loss against Denver
The defense continues to experiment.
As previously stated, the regular season results are largely meaningless to this team. Because of that, Lue is also experimenting with different defensive coverages and schemes that will help the Cavs in the long-run. Unfortunately, this is sacrificing their current play.
Unlike before the trades, the Cavs do have good defensive players. But, defense is a team thing and the team isn’t on the same page yet.
Cleveland Cavaliers
After Thursday’s lackluster offensive performance Lue spoke about how he was going to simplify the offense. The offense was doing too much thinking and looked stagnant for stretches the last few games. He simplified the offense on Saturday night, ran a lot of LeBron pick-and-rolls as the screener, and ended up with a 124.2 offensive rating. But he hasn’t done that with the defense and he probably won’t until the playoffs if things don’t get better.
The Cavs’ defense was outstanding the first two games after the trades. They simplified the defense immensely and played a simple drop coverage in pick-and-rolls. This resulted in solid defensive games because of their improved personnel, but this type of defense has a much lower ceiling than the complex defense Lue is trying to incorporate.
Like every other aspect of the Cavs, they are taking the long-view. They know they can’t potentially stop high powered offenses like the Warriors or Rockets without playing an aggressive, trapping defense. Unfortunately for Cleveland, this is an almost impossible defense to learn on the fly.
Saturday’s game was a perfect example of how tough of a defense this is to implement. Miscommunications were prevalent. This resulted in defenders sprinting to the wrong player, switching onto players they shouldn’t have been, and rotations being late. Simply put, the Nuggets got a lot of open shots because of this and seemed to hit every single one of them.
Learning new schemes and how to communicate on defense is much harder than it appears. There will be growing pains through this process, but considering the Cavs desires to compete for a championship, they’re growing pains that they have to go through.