As has been a common theme in these game recaps this season, the Cavs are not a very good team.  They are going to lose more games than they win. The team was flirting with a playoff berth for much of the year and that had some media members and fans excited even though it was clearly fool’s gold.  

As Tom Reed of the Cleveland Plain Dealer pointed out on his Twitter feed on Tuesday night, the Cavs have lose their last two home games by a combined 72 points.  This is not something that should ever happen to any playoff team under any circumstances.  Even if the Dallas Mavericks lost Dirk Nowitzki to injury for two games, they have enough depth to not lose two games by an average of 36 points.

The Cavs have insurmountable problems.  The only hope of righting the ship is for the season to end as quickly as possible.  To think that playoffs were ever in the collective psyche of Cleveland fans makes me wish that I could make an appointment with Lacuna, Inc.  It is regrettable and something that should be forgotten.  

The team that the Cavs should be modeling themselves after is the New Orleans Hornets.  They have not been winning many games, but they are playing hard and staying in games that they do not have any business being in.  It is one thing to be outmatched and to lose because the other team has a more-talented roster and it is another to not show any effort whatsoever.  A lot of the players on the Cavs roster are fringe NBA talent and they cannot even show up and play hard on a nightly basis despite the fact that their futures may depend on it.

The Cavs continued their downward spiral into futility against the Spurs in front of 14,759 fans.  The star of the night was former Cavaliers guard Danny Green.  He put on a show and poured-in 19 points on only 11 shots.  Green played like a man on a mission and made it abundantly clear that the Cavs made a mistake by waiving him in October of 2010.  It is a very small sample size, but Danny Green did his best to show the Cavs that they should have retained his services as opposed to Manny Harris.

To put it into perspective, the Spurs could have not scored a single point in the 4th quarter and the game would have gone into overtime.  The Cavs gave up 59.3% shooting to the Spurs.  In fact, the Spurs shot better from beyond the three-point arc (47.8%) than the Cavs did overall (41.5%).

Kyrie Irving made his return after missing a game after spraining his right shoulder against the Milwaukee Bucks on Friday night.  Irving recorded decent numbers, but did so without high efficiency.  He scored 13 points on 15 shots and was torched on defense in his 29 minutes of playing time.  Not a single Cavalier had a positive +/-, but Irving’s was exceptionally bad.  With Irving on the floor, the Cavs were outscored by 23 points.  Very little should be made of a bad performance against an elite team while injured, but it also should not be ignored.

The good news is that the season will be over soon.  Next season will have plenty of struggles, but hopefully it will be with some a little more of a youth movement after the draft.  The bad news is that there are still fifteen games left with little to play for other than next year.

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ESPN blogger Henry Abbott has been on a mission to end tanking this past week.  He has blogged about it extensively and discussed it on his weekly podcast.  Abbott does not like that the NBA “rewards” bad teams with high draft picks.  

All of the ideas he has had that are intended to quell tanking would be detrimental to a lot of NBA teams.  If a team is bad, it need an infusion of talent to hopefully make it better.  Doing away with the lottery is going to almost guarantee that teams in less-than-desirable markets will lose the little hope that they have of becoming elite.  It is a bad idea and it opens the door for plenty of unknown and unintended consequences.  On the other hand, one has to wonder if limiting the lottery or losing it all together would help prevent games like the one that the Cavs played against the Knicks on Saturday night.  

The handful of people who decided to watch the matchup between the Cavs and Knicks instead of the Final Four were subjected to a combined shooting of 39.1% by both teams.  Cleveland had 13 assists compared to their 19 turnovers.  The lone block shot by the Cavs was from Omri Casspi.  The most pathetic statistic of all is that Antawn Jamison was the high scorer for the Cavs with 13 points on 33% shooting.  

The Cavs are in a position to draft high in the lottery despite vying for a playoff spot for much of the year.  One has to really question if the team is indeed tanking.  Injuries have been an issue and much of the game was essentially Antawn Jamison with a group of Developmental League players.  There is only so much winning a team that devoid of talent can accomplish.  As Abbott argued, tanking leads to bad basketball and that is not fair to fans who follow teams and pay money to go to games.  Having said that,  Where his argument fails is that the NBA cannot mandate that teams will be competitive down the stretch of the season.  There is not a system in the world that will make matches like the Cavs and Knicks not happen.  

The game featured poor shooting by both teams and a lot of turnovers.  Landry Fields alone had 6 miscues for the Knicks.  

Tristan Thompson’s play regressed from his most recent performance against the Bucks on Friday night.  Thompson played only 15:28 minutes and he did not see the floor in the entire fourth quarter.  Thompson was mostly non-existent in his limited time.  He finished the night with more fouls (4) than points (3) and only a single rebound.  

A lone bright spot for Cleveland was Donald Sloan.  He got his first start out of necessity and he held his own.  The numbers he recorded (10 points, 7 rebounds and 4 assists) were not phenomenal by any means, but he looked like an NBA player.  That is not always a given for guys who are called up from the Developmental League.

As Cavs fans are accustomed to after his short stint in Cleveland, Baron Davis did not make a lot of his shots early on.  What he did do was show off his great court vision and he even made a huge three point basket late in the fourth quarter.  The most impressive Knick was JR Smith.  He can either shoot a team into a loss or a win.  Against the Cavs, his shots were falling.  He came off the bench and finished with 20 points and 9 rebounds.

The Cavs have hit a wall and the best thing that can happen for the team is for the season to end soon.  They have not scored more than 85 points in a game since they put up 102 in an overtime loss against the Atlanta Hawks.  Since then, they are averaging 80 points per game in six different matches.  To make matters worse, the Cavs play sixteen games in April and nine of them are against current playoff teams.  

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When the Cavaliers last met the Bucks a couple weeks ago, the two teams were separated by just one game in the “battle” for the 8th playoff spot in the East. Tonight, they looked separated by leagues—a fairly talented NBA franchise invading the home court of a middling AAU squad.  Or so the score would indicate, anyway, as Milwaukee metaphorically depantsed and atomic-wedgied the Cavs for 48 utterly humiliating minutes, 121-84.

Cleveland (17-32) has dropped six straight; the last five of which were routs. To say they’re slumping, though, would suggest that this particular team—with the likes of Donald Sloan, Manny Harris, Samardo Samuels, and some fella named Lester Hudson logging actual minutes—would ordinarily produce results superior to what we’ve seen of late. This is not a slump, friends. This is a really, really, really bad basketball team.

Back on March 14, Milwaukee (24-27) needed a fluky triple-double from Drew Gooden to edge the Cavs. But these were not the same clubs that met that night. While Cleveland traded away Ramon Sessions, cut Ryan Hollins, and lost even more backcourt depth with a season ending injury to Boobie Gibson, the Bucks shipped Andrew Bogut and Stephen Jackson to Golden State for a bigtime weapon in Monta Ellis. By no coincidence, Milwaukee’s gone 5-3 since that last meeting, while the Cavs have jumped into the abyss at 1-7.

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There are eighteen games left in this lockout shortened NBA campaign.  The Cavs have been wildly entertaining compared to the 2010-2011 version. Kyrie (Rack City) Irving has exceeded my personal expectations.  Tristan Thompson looks like he could definitely be a solid rotational big man if not a starter and players like Alonzo Gee have come on to also look to be a part of the core moving forward.  However the reality of the situation is that the Cavs are now 17-31 and fading fast in the Eastern Conference.  At the time of writing this piece they are now a full seven games out of the 8 seed and much closer to a Top 5 lottery pick than the playoffs.  In my opinion this is good news.

I of course want the Cavs to do well, but as I have chronicled in my previous two installments of this series (Here and Here) it really is better for the Cavs to lose games this season and hope the ping pong balls bounce their way.  With that being said let’s take a look at where our Cavaliers stand in my hope that they can add another young piece via the draft lottery (ala the OKC Thunder) and build a young core to compete for years to come.

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