Before we unpack the Cleveland Cavaliers' 99-84 loss to the Miami Heat on Saturday, it's important to lay out the reality of the situation.
By the time the Cavs cleared out of the locker room after their overtime loss to the New Orleans Pelicans on Friday, it was after midnight. By the time they flew to Miami and arrived at the team hotel, it was close to 5 a.m. You can only imagine that the hour most of the players settled in for any meaningful rest was sometime after that.
As if the quick turnaround on the road wasn't enough, Cleveland was also without not only Kyrie Irving and Iman Shumpert but LeBron James, too, whom coach David Blatt decided to sit out after James played a season-high-tying 45 minutes against the Pelicans.
This was the textbook definition of what NBA types call a "scheduled loss," a reality of the 82-game grind that teams never want to accept but generally acknowledge.
All that said, there's another reality about these Cavs after their third consecutive loss dropped them to 5-6 in their past 11 games following an 8-1 start to the season: They are unmistakably in a rut, and it doesn't seem like everyone in the locker room wants to own up to his responsibility for the downturn.
Let's start with Kevin Love. With no James and no Irving, he should be Cleveland's unequivocal go-to guy. You wouldn't have known it from watching Saturday. Blatt tried to protect Love after the game, saying, "I can't just say one guy, and I wouldn't just say one guy, because it wasn't just one guy,” when asked about Love, calling his performance "underwhelming" would probably be considered a compliment.
Only two Cavs players scored less than Love's five points on 2-for-11 shooting (along with eight rebounds, two assists and three turnovers in 23 minutes) in Miami: Anderson Varejao and the little-used Sasha Kaun, who combined for four points on three shots in 22 total minutes.
When asked about the back-to-back situation, Love took the life preserver: "The first half, it was very tough." When asked if he had any greater responsibility to perform, considering the state of the lineup, he again didn't own his role in the proceedings. "I don't know," Love said. "I know it was a hell of a thing to go into overtime last night, get in late. But we picked up the energy better in the second half, and things will just get better as the season progresses."
Talk matters far less than results, and Matthew Dellavedova's 11 points on 4-for-11 shooting and five assists wasn't a whole lot better of an output than what Love produced, but at least his answers are the things you want to hear out of a competitive person.
On the brutal travel schedule, Dellavedova said, "I think it's more of the mental thing, so you just try not to think about it." And on if Cleveland simply missing its full roster is the cause for its woes: "I don't think we should be saying, 'When we get the pieces back.' I think it's very fixable right now."
Where the entire team is lacking is not just in responsibility, but in recognition of how opposing teams approach playing Cleveland. The embarrassment of falling down by 27 points to Miami in a loss that dropped the Cavs' road record to 4-6 seemed, finally, to make that point set in.
"I think we just got a little too lax thinking because we're the Cavs and we got 'Bron and Kevin and Kyrie and Shump, the players that we have, [the opposition is] just going to come out here and not play as hard as they would against any other team," J.R. Smith said. "But we got to realize that people are going to play harder than that. This is a big game for them every time we step on the court. They're just trying to get a marquee win. And when we realize that and take that into consideration, we'll be better."
Tristan Thompson echoed those sentiments, remembering when he was on a bad Cavs team during James' "in-between years," as some Cleveland staffers refer to James' time in Miami, and all he wanted to do was beat a good team to validate his season.
"We just got to get back to the basics. We got to watch film, we got to get back in the gym together as a team and just find an identity," Thompson said. "I think we're going to get every team's best game, and we got to understand that, and we can’t be surprised when a team comes out and knocks down a couple shots or plays or does things that statistically they're not great at. Because every night, a team is going to get pumped up. I remember being in that same position when I was on a team that wasn't playing for much. When you play against the top dogs, that shot you usually don't make for the rest of the season, you make it that game. So we got to be prepared for that."
As Thompson was giving his answer, he slipped on a red suede jacket with zippers galore to wear for a night on the town in Miami. The fashion statement prompted Love to look up from his seat at his locker and start singing Michael Jackson's "Thriller," falsetto-style. It might have been Love's best effort of the night.
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