1 stud and 1 dud for Cavaliers from ugly loss to the Raptors on Monday

Cavaliers dud: Three-point shooting

While Monday night was a tough and ugly loss, a lot of it can be blamed on the Cavaliers’ three-point shooting. However, it isn’t all bad for J.B. Bickerstaff and company, considering offensively, they were getting a lot of open looks, they just weren’t able to knock them down. The offense wasn’t as efficient with Mitchell having an off night, but they were still able to get open looks.

This season the Cavs are the NBA’s fourth-best three-point shooting team, hitting them at a 38% rate. Only the Denver Nuggets, Boston Celtics, and Golden State Warriors shoot better from deep than the Cavaliers. Last night Cleveland was only 7-of-38 from three, which was easily their lowest percentage and number of made threes on the year.

Hopefully, Monday night was just some sort of anomaly. With that being said, it could come back to haunt the Cavaliers later in the season, or in the playoffs. Hey, even Larry Bird didn’t make all of his three-point attempts.

But, it’s important that the Cavs still focus on their inside game and the development of Mobley and Allen. We’ve seen a lot of good teams over the past couple of years stumble because they were too reliant on the three-point shot.

Now the Cavs will have to rest up and get their minds focused on a good 76ers team, who has been struggling through some injuries. Tyrese Maxey will not be available on Wednesday, and James Harden may not play as well.

However, the Cavs still need to come out and hit their shots to get back into the win column. As I noted earlier, they had open looks all night on Monday night, it just so happened their legs didn’t seem to be there.

Cleveland will play five of the next six games in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, with the only road game coming this weekend in New York at the Knicks. The Cavaliers have only lost one home game all season, so they should be comfortable through this tough stretch.

Let’s just hope they start hitting their open shots again, or there could be a couple more results like last night in the near future.