As the NBA’s regular season draws near, we’re counting down the top 10 storylines to watch around the league over the course of the 2014-15 campaign. Today’s entry is about how the new super team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, will work out in its first year together.
It always seemed like a possibility LeBron James would head back to Cleveland later in his career after he abruptly left the franchise in 2010. But that didn’t make it any less shocking when James used an article in Sports Illustrated to announce his decision to return to Northeast Ohio.
The move capped a stunning four years for the Cavaliers, who, after losing James, remarkably wound up winning the lottery three times — landing Kyrie Irving, Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins — to give themselves the kind of young core that could both attract James and give them the ammunition to acquire the NBA’s best power forward, Kevin Love, from Minnesota in a trade later this summer.
In a matter of months, Cleveland created a super team of Irving, James and Love — the best offensive trio in the league by far — and surrounded them with a bunch of solid role players such as Dion Waiters, Tristan Thompson, Shawn Marion, Mike Miller and Anderson Varejao. Cleveland immediately is expected to do no worse than reach the Eastern Conference Finals and is thought by many to be the favorite to win the NBA title.
But despite the obvious talent the Cavaliers possess, there’s still plenty of work for new coach David Blatt and his staff to do to properly blend this group together. The most important question: How will this team fare on defense?
The Cavs will have no problem scoring and it would be surprising if they don’t finish as the top offense in the league with the amount of firepower they possess. But the Cavaliers have very little in the way of rim protection, and outside of James, their only above-average defenders are Marion and Varejao — both of whom are aging veterans on the downsides of their careers (and, in Varejao’s case, a massive injury risk).
Blatt has talked about using multiple looks on defense, depending on the matchup, to make up for this, but it’s going to take some creative coaching to make all of the pieces form a competent defensive team, which Cleveland will need to be if it wants to achieve its title aspirations.
Another, less severe issue is keeping everyone happy. The Cavaliers have four players — Irving, Waiters, James and Love — who are used to having the ball in their hands and getting a lot of shots. With the current makeup of the roster, that’s no longer possible.
Blatt always has utilized a Princeton-style offense with lots of motion and ball movement, and has been considered a gifted offensive coach throughout his decorated international coaching career. He’ll need to put all of those gifts to the test to keep everyone satisfied with the Cavaliers, who easily will average over 100 points if they have everyone healthy.
The final thing the Cavs must worry about is a lack of playoff experience. While James has played 158 playoff games and several role players have been in the big moments, the other main cogs in the machine — Love, Irving and Waiters — have never stepped on the court in a playoff game.
It’s one thing to put up huge numbers from November through April, but it’s quite another to be down five entering the fourth quarter on the road — let’s say in Chicago against the battle-tested Bulls — in an Eastern Conference Finals game. There’s no way to know how the Cavaliers will react.
But it sure will be fun watching them try to figure it out.