TORONTO — If you’re a Toronto Raptors fan, you cannot be faulted for wanting to forget about the Cleveland Cavaliers for a while.
The Raptors have barely played a quarter of their season, and yet they’ve already faced the defending champions three times, losing in equally demoralizing fashion on each occasion.
They lost by three on the second night of the season, by four in mid-November, and by four again Monday night despite playing an objectively good game of basketball. The Raptors shot 43.2 per cent, had four players score double digits, won the turnover battle dramatically (Cleveland had 16 turnovers; Toronto had 7) and matched their opposition when it comes to both getting to the free-throw line and points in the paint.
And yet, Cleveland never truly felt in danger of losing the game. Or any game they play, really. They are undeniably the best team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference—a comprehensively constructed, embarrassingly talented, soul-destroying machine. If you’re going to beat them, you need to be at your best.
"We’ve got to play a perfect game to beat a team like that," Casey said. "You’ve got to be close to 94, 95 per cent."
On Monday night, the Raptors weren’t 94 or 95 per cent. They were maybe 90 per cent. And they still lost. Here are three reasons why.
Sheer star power
Very good teams are generally filled with very good players, but the Cavaliers take things to another level. It’s not just LeBron James, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, who would all be the focal point of an offence on practically any other team in the league. It’s the support players—like Tristan Thompson, Channing Frye, Iman Shumpert and Richard Jefferson—too.
"They’ve got Channing, who shoots the ball well. Kevin, who shoots the ball well. Kyrie. I mean, they’ve got a bunch of guys who make shots," Lowry said. "You can’t disrespect any of those guys.
"Tristan is a superstar at his position. He’s a star offensive rebounder. Kevin Love is an unbelievable rebounder. Shumpert is unbelievable. They have great size and length and abilities. And they’ve got RJ, who’s a veteran player and knows how to play the game."
Think about it this way: Cleveland’s starting shooting guard, J.R. Smith, generally logs 30 minutes a night and plays a very important part in the Cavaliers’ systems. On Monday, he was lost just 10 minutes into the game to a knee injury. And it appeared to make absolutely zero difference. They simply rolled through their bench and found another way to get it done.
If you try to take away one player—as the Cavaliers did to middling success with DeMar DeRozan early in Monday’s game—they find a way to produce with another.
"They have so many situations they put you in where you concentrate on James, and there’s Irving, and then there’s Fry spaced out, and then there’s Love and you’ve got to rotate out to Love," Casey said. "You’ve really got to pick your poison."
A nightmare matchup for a centre
Big, traditional, plodding centres like Jonas Valanciunas simply cannot hang with a Cavaliers team that often goes small, rotating Frye and James into the position throughout the game.
It’s an automatic mismatch defensively, especially when those players pull Valanciunas away from the glass where he does his best work. And when you mix in a less than stellar offensive game from Valanciunas you end up with what you got Monday—a 1-for-8 night from the field and a seat on the bench for the entire fourth quarter.
Backup centre Lucas Nogueira offers more mobility than Valanciunas, and actually played one of his better games of the season Monday. But he too was essentially hopeless when the Cavaliers went small.
"It’s a matchup league," Casey said. "I thought Lucas did a little bit better job of guarding Frye, which is a hard matchup for any five in this league. Not just Jonas and Lucas. He’s really a four playing the five. You give up something."
The x-factor
At least three times Monday night, if not more, the Raptors defended the Cavaliers well, disrupting their ball movement and forcing them into a low percentage shot, only to watch it all go to hell. A broken play would end up with a heavily contested three-pointer passing perfectly through the hoop. An air ball would fall right into the waiting hands of a Cavalier under the basket for an easy bucket. A rebound would careen off the rim to a part of the floor where only Cleveland could corral it.
"For us, we can have a good possession, but, you know, then LeBron gets an offensive rebound and a layup," Lowry said. "It’s those little small things."
The x-factor for this Cleveland team, as if they needed anything else to go their way, is its ability to turn poor possessions into points. It’s ability to weather your best defensive storm and still exploit your most minute weakness—your smallest misstep—and turn it to their advantage. Casey says it’s a matter of not letting your attention slip, even for a moment.
"It’s not like it’s a mystery. When you play a team like that, the mental part, the mental mistakes—you just can’t have mental mistakes," Casey said. "Because they’re going to capitalize. Every time you don’t get a 50-50 ball, you don’t get a defensive board, they’re going to cash in on it. If you don’t execute a play, if you don’t set a screen, if you’re not in position on your pick-and-roll defence, they’re going to make you pay. The margin of error for us on both ends of the floor is very small."
