Game 19: Trailblazers @ Cavs 11/30/2023

[jasonxxx102]

For those who can’t see JBs total incompetence id love to hear an explanation for this.

Cavs come out with an obvious game plan of getting into the paint. Mobley and Allen are both being intentional and the guards are getting them the ball.

Same thing to start the 2nd half. Mobley scores the 1st 6 points and for the next few minutes Cavs build a lead.

Once they get a lead they totally abandon the game plan and start over dribbling, throwing the ball away, taking bad shots…

And when they’re behind guess what, JB has no clue what to do so he just let Mitchell dribble the air out of the ball.

How many shots did Mobley take in the 4th? ONE SINGLE SHOT. How could that not be JBs fault? Call a timeout and tell Donovan to pass the damn ball. He has no control over the team or the players.

As soon as there’s any adversity he throws the gameplan right out the window and stands on the sideline with a dumb look on his face. Pure and total incompetence

You seem to be under the impression that some of us here don’t think JB deserves blame. In reality this is like the third or fourth loss that can be attributed to him not adjusting when needed, or, if we want to be meaner, utter incompetence on his part.

The thing is that it’s not just on him. You could tell by how the cavaliers were playing that they just stopped taking the blazers seriously, which is the worst thing you can do to a team that is building momentum. This falls on everyone, not just Bickerstaff.

Everyone needs to learn a very real and very serious lesson from this loss. There is no reason we shouldn’t have been able to ride the momentum we had and get an easy victory. And yet we only manage to score 95 points for the game against a team with little to no rim protection.

To show up for games like this you need an effective leader to motivate his players. Clearly JB cannot do that. Not only do they not get up for games like this, they weren’t even hungry coming into the season. All the talk about learning from the Knicks series was obviously empty. None of these guys were ready to play.

On top of that you’re acting like this season exists in a vacuum and there’s “time to figure it out”. It’s like nobody watched JB do the exact same stuff the last 2 seasons. He’s never changed his style to adapt to the team.

This season is lost unless JB is gone soon (I know he won’t be). The team as coached and constructed just isn’t good, we don’t need to do the what ifs and maybes. We can just be honest about it

[Iwasawitness]

For those who can’t see JBs total incompetence id love to hear an explanation for this.

Cavs come out with an obvious game plan of getting into the paint. Mobley and Allen are both being intentional and the guards are getting them the ball.

Same thing to start the 2nd half. Mobley scores the 1st 6 points and for the next few minutes Cavs build a lead.

Once they get a lead they totally abandon the game plan and start over dribbling, throwing the ball away, taking bad shots…

And when they’re behind guess what, JB has no clue what to do so he just let Mitchell dribble the air out of the ball.

How many shots did Mobley take in the 4th? ONE SINGLE SHOT. How could that not be JBs fault? Call a timeout and tell Donovan to pass the damn ball. He has no control over the team or the players.

As soon as there’s any adversity he throws the gameplan right out the window and stands on the sideline with a dumb look on his face. Pure and total incompetence

You seem to be under the impression that some of us here don’t think JB deserves blame. In reality this is like the third or fourth loss that can be attributed to him not adjusting when needed, or, if we want to be meaner, utter incompetence on his part.

The thing is that it’s not just on him. You could tell by how the cavaliers were playing that they just stopped taking the blazers seriously, which is the worst thing you can do to a team that is building momentum. This falls on everyone, not just Bickerstaff.

Everyone needs to learn a very real and very serious lesson from this loss. There is no reason we shouldn’t have been able to ride the momentum we had and get an easy victory. And yet we only manage to score 95 points for the game against a team with little to no rim protection.

To show up for games like this you need an effective leader to motivate his players. Clearly JB cannot do that. Not only do they not get up for games like this, they weren’t even hungry coming into the season. All the talk about learning from the Knicks series was obviously empty. None of these guys were ready to play.

On top of that you’re acting like this season exists in a vacuum and there’s “time to figure it out”. It’s like nobody watched JB do the exact same stuff the last 2 seasons. He’s never changed his style to adapt to the team.

This season is lost unless JB is gone soon (I know he won’t be). The team as coached and constructed just isn’t good, we don’t need to do the what ifs and maybes. We can just be honest about it

Being able to motivate his players is actually one of JBs positive qualities, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about. We don’t know if Bickerstaff was telling his guys to stop dicking around and start taking the other team seriously or not, so it makes little sense to family Bickerstaff for that. What we CAN fault him for is what we see on his end as it pertains to the plays that we run and the adjustments we make. And that’s where the problem lies: Bickerstaff didn’t make any adjustments to what the blazers were doing.

Truth be told, even the most minimal of adjustments should have been enough to beat this blazers team. Is what makes his loss so frustrating and arguably the worst the Cavs have had in years. There had to be a perfect storm of everyone just not pulling their weight and they managed to pull that off.

You are right about one thing though. At this point, Bickerstaff is the biggest obstacle this team faces. And it kind of sucks that the Cavs have had some really great wins against the top tier teams this season because honestly, if it wasn’t for those, Bickerstaff probably would be getting fired as a result of this game. His short rotations, while not the reason we lost tonight, are a very serious problem as it shows that he’s trying to win games at all costs instead of actually build something. There’s no reason Porter Jr shouldn’t be getting consistent minutes at this point. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be experimenting, especially against the lower tier teams. But last night really demonstrated how bad his weaknesses are. And they’re going to always hold us back.

[JujitsuFlip]

Yeah, that's my biggest thing. There was literally nothing learned from the April beatdown.

JB has talked an awesome game to the media and followed through on exactly 0% of it.

[JonFromVA]

Well, we did increase our pace from last in the league to 20th.

One of our other goals was to improve our 3pt shooting, but our team 3pt% is down because Garland, Mitchell, Wade, and LeVert have all been shooting poorly.

And of course we know how his desire to expand the rotation has gone. The good news is at least players are getting breaks pretty consistently in-game.

[jbk1234]

Or, Garland and Mitchell need to stop calling their own number every play. We were looking great early. Then the hero ball, isos, passes chucked into the third row of seats.

This is our first loss to a bad team this year and probably won't be the last, but we'd better use this loss as a lesson to clean up some selfish, sloppy play.

Seems like that is explicitly a coaches job...

A bit of both the players and the coaching staff. I have to assume some of the odd hero ball stuff down the stretch was not the gameplan.

Right?

This game concerned me in ways I hadn't been before. Garland is not normally a hero ball guy, and I hope hasn't arrived at the conclusion that Mitchell isn't changing so he's got to hunt his own shot.

You also don't want to overreact to a single game where the other team packed the paint and dared the Cavs, particularly Garland and Mitchell, to make 3s. If you were to scale that approach over 40 games, it ends poorly for the Blazers the vast majority of the time.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but one thing I've seen quite enough of is teams coming into Cleveland, shoving Allen and Mobley all over the court, and the officials swallowing their whistles. If the league won't address it, and the Cavs aren't able to change it, the Allen and Mobley need to do something about it on the court as it happens. Turn around and shove back a couple times.

[toooskies]

Seems like that is explicitly a coaches job...

A bit of both the players and the coaching staff. I have to assume some of the odd hero ball stuff down the stretch was not the gameplan.

Right?

This game concerned me in ways I hadn't been before. Garland is not normally a hero ball guy, and I hope hasn't arrived at the conclusion that Mitchell isn't changing so he's got to hunt his own shot.

You also don't want to overreact to a single game where the other team packed the paint and dared the Cavs, particularly Garland and Mitchell, to make 3s. If you were to scale that approach over 40 games, it ends poorly for the Blazers the vast majority of the time.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but one thing I've seen quite enough of is teams coming into Cleveland, shoving Allen and Mobley all over the court, and the officials swallowing their whistles. If the league won't address it, and the Cavs aren't able to change it, the Allen and Mobley need to do something about it on the court as it happens. Turn around and shove back a couple times.

Yeah, if you were feeling optimistic you'd just chalk the loss up to us shooting 20% from three and them shooting 40%. Duop Reath going 3/4 instead of 0/4.

But the process was clearly bad here. Everyone was sloppy with the ball and even the passes we caught were off-target enough for every shot to rim out. Lots of dribbling till the shot clock runs out. Guys not moving when they didn't have the ball.

[JonFromVA]

Seems like that is explicitly a coaches job...

A bit of both the players and the coaching staff. I have to assume some of the odd hero ball stuff down the stretch was not the gameplan.

Right?

This game concerned me in ways I hadn't been before. Garland is not normally a hero ball guy, and I hope hasn't arrived at the conclusion that Mitchell isn't changing so he's got to hunt his own shot.

You also don't want to overreact to a single game where the other team packed the paint and dared the Cavs, particularly Garland and Mitchell, to make 3s. If you were to scale that approach over 40 games, it ends poorly for the Blazers the vast majority of the time.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but one thing I've seen quite enough of is teams coming into Cleveland, shoving Allen and Mobley all over the court, and the officials swallowing their whistles. If the league won't address it, and the Cavs aren't able to change it, the Allen and Mobley need to do something about it on the court as it happens. Turn around and shove back a couple times.

Garland will use what's around him, so yeah, he will defer to Mitchell or LeVert and formerly Rubio if the defense seems to be keying on him and leaving them. He's a smart kid, but he needs to continue to grow and get smarter. He will take his turn trying to be the hero - which I really don't have a problem with - it just needs to happen when he's feeling it and those careless turnovers have got to be eliminated. It does seem like he's trying to increase the number of fouls he draws and that is a very important trait for a closer; but his FTA per 100 are the same as last season.

We hoped Ricky would be his PG whisperer, but obviously he hasn't been here to do that and if we have someone on staff trying to play that role it's hard to guess who. Luke Walton maybe? That's not quite like having Chauncey on the bench, but teaching is a pretty unique skill that not every player does well.