The streak had to end sometime. Even the 2015-2016 Warriors only (“only”) got to 24 wins to start their season. Ironically, they’d go on to lose the title to the Cavs that season.
That Cleveland lost to the Celtics, in TD Garden, without Isaac Okoro and with Darius Garland shooting 3-21 — well only the first half of that stings. If Garland made two more of those field goals the Cavs would’ve taken the game, and Okoro, out with an ankle sprain, will be back.
This game was a tester for the Cavs. Beyond a match against the defending champs and a potential Eastern Conference Finals preview, it was an opportunity to see how the team responded to pressure, unfavourable conditions and expectation. NBA basketball is about winning, we all know this refrain well, but that the Cavs scoring dried up in crucial stretches while the team also fell into bad habits of turning the ball over in momentum-leeching moments, and they still managed multiple runs to come back within two, speaks pretty well to this group’s ability to respond.
What makes the Celtics so good, and a bit like a dream-crushing machine, is their ability to capitalize on and invert what usually brings their opponents wins. In the Cavs case, it’s their speed. Not just pure speed without aim, but their ability to push the pace within their offensive possessions because not one player tends to move in isolation from anyone else. Their lightning quick passing, their flashing cuts and counter-cuts, it’s all predicated on ball movement capitalizing on intuitive communication. A sixth sense of understanding where their teammates are on the floor at any given moment.
Boston was able to jam that up. Not entirely upend it, but chase with pace of their own enough that Garland at times appeared to be the pursued and not the pursuer. Where Garland rushed an offensive possession, where he went in for a fastbreak ISO drive to wrest the pace of the game back into his team’s hands, he bungled it. He’d botch an easy layup and go careening past the baseline, having to expend more energy to get back down the floor in the transition already underway. And the more he botched it, the faster he went. The Celtics saw this and upped the pressure on him, taking advantage of forced turnovers by draining three after three and all but eliminating a huge component of what’s made the Cavs so formidable — their rebounding.
These are excellent lessons for Cleveland to learn this early in the season, because they likely aren’t hard pills to swallow. If the Celtics had to work as hard as they did in last night’s game to uncover them, it means the Cavs already know where these weaknesses exist. Cleveland has a deep roster, it was one of the points new coach Kenny Atkinson used to make his case for the front office to hire him. I’m going to use your whole team, he told them, and thus far it’s paid dividends. There’s no reason to think that same deep roster can’t learn to control their pace, draw their deep-shooting opponents into the mid-court, and not just constantly push it.
This game was also a tester for the Celtics, albeit the stakes for them seem much lower. Boston got an early preview of the way teams are adjusting to their brand of mechanical basketball, and how they’re going to use those rote mechanics against them. Frustration works well against the Celtics, case in point Jayson Tatum late in the game barrelling into Donovan Mitchell, rattling his jaw hard with a shoulder and sending him sprawling to the floor. At no point did Tatum make a move for the ball, only for the contact. Suffice to say there’s ways to get under the champs skin.
