Cleveland Cavaliers: Two key team defensive goals in 2020-21

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The Cleveland Cavaliers still have a ways to go defensively, but here, we’ll touch on how they can improve there in 2020-21.

In the 2019-20 campaign, the Cleveland Cavaliers again had so many issues on the defensive end of the floor. A combination of playing a bunch of young pieces big minutes played into that, along with Cleveland being mostly devoid of high quality wing defenders.

This past season, which is ultimately over for the Wine and Gold due to them being one of eight teams not invited to a season resumption later this summer in Orlando at Disney World, Cleveland had the NBA’s second-worst defensive rating.

Due to social justice issues, and/or the league’s campus-type format via centralized site resumption, some NBA players are said to be considering sitting the rest of 2019-20, though, per a Monday report from ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne and Adrian Wojnarowski.

Shelburne and Wojnarowski did say, however, that even while there are “expected to be some players who decide not to play,” “so far there’s no indication that it’s enough to compromise the league’s plans to return,” but again either way, the Cavs’ 2019-20 is done.

Swinging back to what we were discussing, it’s evident that the Cavaliers have a ways to go on the defensive end of the floor.

The Wine and Gold had the league’s second-worst defensive rating this past season, as was mentioned. Along with that, they were 25th in opponent three-point shooting percentage and just 25th in opponent turnovers forced per game, per NBA.com.

For the Cavs to further progress in the right direction in their rebuild next season, they’ll need to make some real strides defensively. While I wouldn’t expect them to make a huge leap forward there next season, more experience for key pieces should help a bit in the team sense, and on the interior, they should improve.

Here, we’ll emphasize two key team goals for the Cleveland Cavaliers defense in 2020-21.

The first of those two goals has to do with their paint defense.