The best thing you can say about Tristan Thompson as a basketball player is that he tries hard.
That is not meant to damn with faint praise. The Cleveland Cavaliers power forward from Brampton, Ont., has plenty of other attributes. He’s a smart player, both in his understanding of the game and his understanding of his place in it.
His calling card says, “I’m a superstar in my role.”
But all of those things become relevant and stay true because Thompson tries hard on every play every game, all year long. Until he left the Cavaliers loss to the Indiana Pacers in a walking boot with a calf strain, Thompson had played 414 of a possible 418 games over the past five-plus seasons and, until sidelined briefly at the end of last season with a sprained thumb, had the NBA’s longest ironman streak at 447 games.
But Cleveland announced Thursday that Thompson could be out as long as a month with a calf strain, which raises the question: With Thompson – their most reliable effort player – missing for an extended period, will the Cavaliers’ ‘give-a-crap’ metre officially hit zero?
It’s been teetering there for a while.
The Cavs had already lost four games in five by an average of 13.5 points to powerhouses like the Orlando Magic, Brooklyn Nets, New Orleans Pelicans and the New York Knicks at home, of all things, when James finally decided to take stock of the situation.
James opted for ‘the regular season is garbage anyway’ line of reasoning.
“What is this? October? I’m not about to go crazy over it right now,” he told reporters. “It’s too long of a season, and I’ve been a part of this too many times.”
But just in case, James hosted a Halloween party and then a team meeting to make sure a veteran roster with 10 new faces since they lost to the Warriors in five games in the Finals in June were all on the same page.
And then the Cavs got drilled at home again, this time by the middling Indiana Pacers.
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So what of the Cavaliers now?
“We’re just trying to figure it out on the fly,” he told reporters. “So, our team is kind of depleted as well, both on and off the floor.”
There are extenuating circumstances. One seems to be the combination of the NBA shortening training camp by nearly two weeks, a veteran roster and a short off-season seems to have left some of the league’s best teams slightly out of sorts.
The Warriors have lost three of their first eight games. They didn’t lose their third game until Dec. 1 a year ago. The normally unflappable San Antonio Spurs are 4-3. The Houston Rockets are shooting just 31.3 per cent from three, 27th in the NBA, and are just 6-3 so far.
But it’s easy to convince yourself those situations are blips. The Warriors are already on pace to have the NBA’s all-time most efficient offence and will revert to their top-of-the-table form as soon as they decide they need to. The Spurs have been playing without their MVP candidate, Kawhi Leonard, and Rockets will find their range soon enough, and will soon have hall-of-fame bound Chris Paul back from knee injury.
But with the Cavaliers it’s easier to believe that their early season slide is a portent rather than a detour.
For fans of the Toronto Raptors or the Boston Celtics or the Washington Wizards or almost any team that feels themselves a playoff contender in the Eastern Conference, it’s completely reasonable to look at the No. 1 seed as a more attainable goal than it’s ever been in the James era.
The difference this time around is it’s not that hard to see the Cavs struggles carrying over to the post-season.
For the moment James is still James. He’s averaging a spectacular-for-anyone-else 25.6 points, 8.9 assists and seven rebounds at age 32. But his boxscore stuffing doesn’t count for much when your point guard is a creaky Derrick Rose; your shooting guard is a flaky J.R. Smith or a gassed-looking Dwyane Wade; and your best player not named LeBron is the defensively challenged Isiah Thomas, who is still recovering from off-season hip surgery and whose next game with James will be his first.
The Cavs are allowing 111.3 points per 100 possessions which is 29th in the NBA and three points/100 worse than they did last season when they were 22nd in the NBA. Perhaps more concerning is they have picked up exactly where they were in the final two months of the regular season last year when they finished 29th in defensive rating after the all-star break.
Granted, in between their horrendous defence last year and their horrendous defence this year the Cavaliers went 12-1 in the Eastern Conference playoffs and at least hinted at being competitive in a five-game NBA Finals loss to the historical Warriors.
But is Cleveland falling too far behind?
In a league where the pace of play has increased significantly year over year – from 96.4 possessions per 48 minutes to 99 so far – can last season’s worst transition defence keep up no matter how badly they say they want to?
In a league where three-point attempts are up by 7.5 per cent, Cleveland is the worst at defending the most important shot in the game. How do you flip that switch?
A more pressing question might be: If they can’t, can the Cavaliers score their way out of trouble?
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Even last year in the playoffs, Cleveland was allowing 108 points per 100 possessions, which would be 25th in the NBA at the moment and 24th last year.
But the Cavs rolled to their third straight NBA Finals on the strength of their historically good offence – it was Cleveland that had the most efficient attack in the playoffs last year at with a 118.1 rating, not the Warriors – driven by an almost unsustainable 42.1 per cent from three.
With Kyrie Irving in Boston, Thomas injured and the rest of the roster aging, the Cavaliers’ biggest problem may be that even with James being James, they are 16th in the NBA offensively (104/100) overall and 19th in the percentage of points they generate from threes and 25th in fast-break points.
In other words, the Cavaliers’ struggles may be a whole lot more real than James or anyone else might want to admit. In a league that is getting faster and more perimeter oriented, the Cavaliers are getting slower and struggling to defend from the three-point arc.
Sometimes some plain old hustle can cover up a lot of weakness, but their best energy player, Thompson, is now out for a month. Will the Cavaliers give a crap soon enough? And will it matter when they do?
Try and argue that it’s early days all you want, but the Cavaliers’ days of unfettered access to the NBA Finals – and LeBron’s personal streak of seven straight Finals – may be under a lot more pressure than we realized.
