Cleveland Cavaliers: Team needs to focus on these 3 things next season

Losing simply sucks and the Cleveland Cavaliers have been on that side of things for the last three seasons. Many of you will point to the fact that without LeBron James, of whom this website is named after, the squad is going to perpetually struggle.

What James did for the Cavs was just help the team win all the time. He was a one man wrecking crew and still is, now for the Los Angeles Lakers (when healthy of course).

Now the Cavaliers have a young, scrappy, “work hard” mentality team with Collin Sexton and Darius Garland leading the team forward. To the Cavs credit, they have won 21 games this season which is more than the previous two seasons. But losing is losing and when you have 40 losses on a season to this point, that’s just bad basketball.

I can sugar coat it for you, if you’d like, but I just can’t when you lose 40 games to this point. But there are three areas I’d love for these young Cavaliers to focus on as they finish the season and prepare for a more rigorous and challenging point in this team’s future moving forward.

We’ll highlight those three focus areas for the Cavs here.

The first has to do with getting off to better starts game-to-game.

#1: The Cavs must keep the game close early

How many times this season did the Cavaliers not even show up in the first quarter and, in essence, the game was over before it began? A lot! 19 of their 40 losses, so far this season, the Cavs were down, by at least six points, at the end of the first quarter.

In 11 of those 19 games they were down by more than 10 points! Yikes! Why did the Cavs get off the bus? Head coach J.B. Bickerstaff and his staff need to address this problem with these young kids.

Things like good team passing and distribution of the ball and cutting down on those inexcusable turnovers early will help. I always talked to my players on the importance of moving the offense when you didn’t have the ball.

No standing around. Every possession counts. In the NBA that’s hard to get players to buy into but it goes along way to victory. One of the many issues with the Cavaliers at the moment is that they are so young, with many players still not even 23 years old.

They will and are making lots of mistakes. We know they’ll get better in time, but it’s a grind!