Sitting at 3-5, the losers of four straight, with a bottom-two defense to their name, the Cleveland Cavaliers aren’t doing well.
Most people in and around the NBA aren’t too worried. The Eastern Conference is still a wide-open pit of mediocrity. The Cavaliers have LeBron James. They have a bunch of new faces. Isaiah Thomas will return at some point. Jae Crowder won’t be so blah on offense forever. They’re going to be fine.
Dwyane Wade nevertheless sees some parallels between this Cavs team and the 2013-14 Miami Heat squad that was working off two straight titles and three straight trips to the NBA Finals and began the year a very shaky 4-3. That group eventually made it back to the NBA Finals for a fourth straight time, as these Cavaliers are trying to do now, but they flamed out against the San Antonio Spurs—which explains the quasi-warning Wade issued to his new teammates, per the South Florida Sun-Sentinel‘s Ira Winderman:
“As a team,” Wade told reporters, “we were kind of like this. It was worse because it wasn’t new guys. It was guys who had been around each other four years in a row. Your jokes weren’t funny anymore to other guys. When you walked in, it wasn’t a big smile no more. Guys were just over you.
“It’s like being in a bad marriage. But we somehow made it to the Finals.” . . .
“For the guys that’s here, you have to pull from something else to motivate you, to get you to feel that hunger again like you had that first year,” Wade said. “That’s sports, it’s tough.”
Making so many deep playoff runs is exhausting. That LeBron has now been to seven straight Finals is absolutely absurd. That pressure and fatigue can get to teams. It can also instill complacency—a lack of urgency during the regular season.
Disinterest, in many ways, would be a welcomed problem for the Cavaliers. And watching them, you can sense relative indifference when it comes to defensive rotations. But they’re also dealing with an oft-changing rotation thanks to the bevy of new additions over the summer, many of which don’t really jibe with one another. Mix in this lack of continuity and chemistry with the annual regular-season disinterest, and they could spend a large portion of the schedule fending off hard stretches—particularly when you consider they’ll have to go through much of this all over again when Thomas is ready to rock.
The good news for Cavs fans: Cleveland remains heavy favorites to make another NBA Finals cameo until prove otherwise.
