Dave McMenamin, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

For Cavs, good news and (lots of) bad news

WASHINGTON -- Let’s start by listing all the positive things that the Cleveland Cavaliers have going in their favor after a 91-78 loss to the Washington Wizards on Friday dropped their overall record to 5-6. It’s a short list:

-- They’ve only played 11 games. There are 71 more to go. There is plenty of time for the Cavs to improve and position themselves for a postseason run. LeBron James should be happy he didn’t get his wish and have the league look into shortening the regular season.

-- They’ve managed to stay healthy, for the most part, only losing back-up guard Matthew Dellavedova to a strained knee for a couple of months up to this point. It’s not like they’re Oklahoma City.

-- They have perhaps the most impressive video board in the league, newly installed for this season. Owner Dan Gilbert dubbed it the “humongotron.” It’s pretty sweet.

Told you the list was short.

Now on to what ails them. Take it away, David Blatt:

“I’m concerned about everything right now,” the Cavs coach said after his team stumbled to a season-low 78 points, shooting 36 percent from the field and an even more anemic 22.2 percent from 3. “Every single thing ... We’re just playing in the dark right now.”

They still couldn’t find the light switch when the questions started pouring in after the game.

Hey, Kyrie Irving, how could this team go from averaging 119.3 points per game during that four-game winning streak less than two weeks ago to stalling out against the Wizards? Irving: “I’m not too sure. We don’t have a definitive answer for that now. But we have to figure things out pretty quickly.”

LeBron, how can you explain the lack of energy from your team out there? James: “That’s something that I cannot explain right now. That’s something that we have to have.”

Coach Blatt, where did it all go wrong against the Wizards? Blatt: “We really need to sit down and look at it and think about it before I come out here and make grandiose statements, to be honest with you.”

Kevin Love, why did Blatt say you were “banged up” before the game, saying that you’re “dealing with some little knick-knack things”? Love: “I don’t know. I feel good.”

Unfortunately for the Cavs, the questions they did have the answers to might have been even more revealing of the rut they find themselves in.

Like what about those interesting rotations that Blatt played Friday -- from playing rookie Joe Harris the final 19:28 of the Spurs game on Wednesday because, as Blatt explained, “he’s calm and quiet and intense and defends his position and is constantly making maximum effort,” to not playing him at all in the second half on Friday until there was 1:25 remaining in the fourth and Harris subbed in for James when the Cavs waved the white flag with Saturday’s back-to-back against Toronto in mind; to playing Mike Miller and Brendan Haywood -- together -- in the first quarter in Washington after they’d both started to pick up DNPs; to not getting any bench scoring until there was three minutes left in the third quarter en route to the reserves being outscored 40-9 when the previously stated goal was to cut down on the Big Three’s minutes in order to build a second unit. Have the Cavs found any consistent lineups yet? “No,” James said. “No.”

Or what about Love, who admitted to being frustrated after the Spurs loss from scoring a then season-low 10 points on 12 shots and following that up with eight points on just eight shots versus Washington. Why isn’t he getting the touches that Blatt said the team would help him out with? “There’s a lot of times where I’m kind of spotting up on the perimeter,” Love said, “but that’s just being asked of me.”

(Later he used the third-person when answering a question -- “I’m just doing what’s being asked of me and doing it to the best of my ability. Whether that’s getting the best Kevin Love or not, that just remains to be seen” -- and that’s never a good sign.)

And those turnovers, 19 against the Wizards leading to 24 points for the opponents, weren’t they also a major reason for the San Antonio loss (18 turnovers leading to 22 points) and the Denver defeat (15 leading to 26 points)? “A lot of them are just not taking the possession seriously,” James said. “That’s been a problem for us in our losses.”

Then there are the stats that are even more disconcerting than those answers. Like how James, after going 8-for-21 against the Wizards, now has shot below 40 percent in four out of his first 11 games. That only happened five times all season for him in 2013-14, four times in ’12-13 and five times in ’11-12, according to ESPN Stats & Info.

Or how James and the Cavs have now lost three games in a row. The last time he lost three games in a row was in last year’s Finals and we all know the chain of events that occurred in response to that. Maybe that’s why James could be found sitting with his head down in front of his locker long after the loss Friday and later quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in a tweet mentioning that “challenge and controversy” show the “ultimate measure of a man.” It was a far cry from his own quote following the San Antonio loss when James said he had a “sense of comfort” because he’d experienced a rocky start with Miami already.

Fortunately for the Cavs, there is no stat that measures positive/negative body language, or Cleveland’s plus-minus would be deep in the red for all the slumped shoulders and thousand-yard stares it showed Friday.

The Cavs are a mess right now, there’s no way around it. And it could get worse before it gets better, with the Raptors coming to town with a 10-2 record after a 41-point win over Milwaukee on Friday.

But maybe there’s one more positive we can add to the list up top.

“Well, I hate to use that, but career-wise my teams have been slow starters,” Blatt said after being asked about his Maccabi Tel-Aviv squad that started 4-3 last season before winning it all. “That has been the case over the course of my career, but I don’t know if that necessarily translates or doesn’t to this situation. That’s just a fact.”

The fact of the matter is, Cleveland could use something positive to hold on to right now.

^ Back to Top ^