6 takeaways from Cavs 117-115 loss to Celtics: The same issues keep popping up

The Cleveland Cavaliers sleepwalked through the first 46 minutes of Sunday’s loss to the Boston Celtics. Two good minutes from the Cavs were almost enough to escape with a victory, but a questionable decision to have Donovan Mitchell inbound the ball with 0.6 seconds left in a two-point game instead of taking the potential game-winning shot led to them not doing so.

One of the best parts about basketball is that you can decide who’s up to bat with two outs in the ninth inning. It’s not left to chance like it is in baseball. If you want Shohei Ohtani at the plate with a chance to win the game, he can grab the bat.

Obviously, this isn’t a perfect metaphor. The opposing team can send extra defenders to try and keep the best player from getting the ball. But instead of leveraging that, head coach Kenny Atkinson decided to have Mitchell inbound the ball, effectively removing him from the chessboard entirely.

When asked about it postgame, Atkinson mentioned that he liked having Mitchell’s passing ability in that situation. But as the video shows, there was nobody for him to pass it to. The late-game action was just a simple screen between Darius Garland and Evan Mobley. Once Boston switched it, there was nothing else there.

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If you really wanted to get Mobley the ball, Mitchell needed to be on the court. Swapping Mitchell and Dean Wade would’ve given this a better chance of working. Figuring out how to stay with Mitchell is a more dangerous proposition for a defense than with Garland. This would’ve also allowed for whoever wasn’t involved in the screen for Mobley to draw attention elsewhere in a way neither Wade nor Jaylon Tyson could.

The error was not prioritizing your best player when the game was on the line. Instead of having your all-world shooting guard decide the game, he was left on deck in a sport where the only reason that would happen is if you willfully chose for that to be the case.

Despite this decision, this isn’t why the Cavs lost. The same issues are recurring with this core.

There’s still a lack of “toughness” with this group. When things aren’t going well, they have a hard time turning it around. That was on display against the Indiana Pacers last May. This season, it’s been seen on a semi-frequent basis.

“As a team, we’re not hungry enough,” Tyson said postgame. “What happened to us last year it’s a similar thing that was happening this year. We’re being ran out of the gym. Getting beat on the ground. … Toughness. It’s a common theme. It’s on us to fix it.”

So how do you fix it?

“Come together as a team,” Tyson said. “Do your job and just compete. Want it more than the other team. I feel like teams want it more than us. I understand there’s a target on a lot of our guys’ backs, a lot of our guys, right? And it’s everybody’s job. If you want to come at us, let’s go. Let’s make this a dogfight.”

The Cavs are not winning many dogfights these days.

Tyson and Nae’Qwan Tomlin aren’t to blame for that. The energy and force they play with continue to stand out. But again, that’s the issue.

Tyson and Tomlin’s energy wouldn’t be as noticeable on the two teams leading their conference — the Oklahoma City Thunder and Detroit Pistons. And if the Cavs want to reach that tier at some point, Tomlin and Tyson can’t be the only ones playing like this.

The Cavaliers had no answer for Payton Pritchard. He got wherever he wanted to on the court as he poured in 42 points. Pritchard is a good player. This isn’t a knock on him, but if you’re a championship-caliber team, you’d ideally like to have someone you could put on him to slow him down or at least make things difficult for him.

Right now, the Cavs don’t have a way to stop a perimeter player who gets going. Garland and Mitchell were bad defensively, and there isn’t an Isaac Okoro-esque player on the roster to bail them out.

The backcourt’s only hope is outscoring its opponent. And tonight, they couldn’t do so.

Injuries continue to be an issue, but that can’t be used as a crutch. Cleveland isn’t the only team dealing with injuries. Jalen Williams just played his first game with the Thunder this season. And on Sunday, the Celtics were without Jayson Tatum (as they will likely be all season), didn’t have Derrick White, and were on the second leg of a back-to-back. But that wasn’t used as an excuse for not playing a discernible style or lacking effort.

Additionally, there isn’t a guarantee that this team will be fully healthy this season. Sideline reporter Serena Winters mentioned during the broadcast that Garland is still experimenting with plates in his shoe and toe spacers as he’s recovering from the toe surgery this summer. I’m not a doctor, but based on that information, it seems like this is something he’s just going to have to play through all season.

And even if they do get healthy at some point, that isn’t guaranteed to fix everything. As Mitchell has pointed out repeatedly, this isn’t last year’s team. And their play on the court backs that up.

At some point, we may have to accept that this Cavs team isn’t a championship contender. They aren’t close to that level now, and they haven’t shown many signs that would make you believe they could get there.

Right now, the Cavs have the 13th-best record in the league, 14th-rated offense, 9th-rated defense, and have the 13th-best point differential. These are the hallmarks of a 45-win team that would be happy to win a first-round series.

The play on the court backs that up. They have good games and bad games, but there isn’t a consistent level of excellence that you would need from a championship team. And more worringly, there aren’t glimpses of it either. There aren’t stretches in games where they dominate both sides of the ball or overwhelm opponents with their offensive firepower. This is true even on nights when the team is mostly healthy.

It’s easy to point to teams like last season’s Pacers or the 2022 Celtics — who started 20-21 before making a run to the Finals — as teams that started slow and turned it around. However, those are the exceptions, not the norms.

The Cavaliers theoretically have the talent to right the ship and become a Finals-worthy team — especially in a conference as poor as this year’s East. However, they haven’t earned the benefit of that doubt. Their play on the court doesn’t suggest that they can. And their inability to respond well to adversity in the playoffs in their three previous postseason runs doesn’t make you believe they could summon something that we hadn’t seen all season there, as the 2018 LeBron James-led team did.

We’re at the quarter point of the season. The first twenty or so games are usually indicative of who a team actually is. And if that’s true for this Cavs team, we can guarantee there will be many changes next summer as a result.