The Cavs — a team that entered the season with a belief that they could do something special — got outclassed by the reigning champion Denver Nuggets, 130-101.
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“…That’s a championship-level team without their second-best player. Credit to them. They executed well and they have guys who have won rings and been there, but if we want to be that, a 29-point loss ain’t it.” (Donovan Mitchell)
Mitchell isn’t typically so grim. Even during an uneven start to the season, with the Cavs needing about three weeks to creep over the .500 mark, Mitchell remained optimistic, repeatedly pointing to the calendar and expressing confidence that they would turn it around. He said if the Cavs were still stumbling with the playoffs approaching, it would be troublesome.
Well, here they are.
Weeks away from the postseason. Coming off their worst month. A glut of unanswered questions. Countless red flags. An unprecedented midseason surge that suddenly feels more like a mirage.
“I told you at the beginning of the season, if we had these struggles at this point then it’s a problem,” Mitchell said, referencing an early-November conversation in Oklahoma City after Cleveland dropped to 3-5. “It can’t happen. I can say all this now. We have to find a way to figure it out. …But it can’t happen. We can all point to shit. It’s April. It’s fucking April.”…
Sunday was Cleveland’s 13th double-digit loss this season. Nearly half of those were in March — a hellish month in which the Cavs went just 7-10. Suddenly, they are clinging to the third spot in the Eastern Conference…
Since the All-Star break… the Cavs rank 21st in offensive rating, 22nd in defensive rating and 23rd in net rating.
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“You have to put stock into it,” Jarrett Allen said of those rankings. “That’s quite a few games. Can’t call them all bluffs. This is the team we are and the players we have…”
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The people of Cleveland are a net negative on the universe. But one must credit them this: When the rest of us need an injection of schadenfreude, the people of Cleveland have horse needles full of the stuff.