NEW YORK -- Little, if anything, can be gleaned about the state of the Cleveland Cavaliers based on their performance in Sunday’s 101-83 blowout win over the New York Knicks.
The game seemed to be over before it really ever began, with the 10-45 Knicks going with Lou Amundson, Lance Thomas, Jason Smith, Jose Calderon and Langston Galloway in the starting lineup against the Cavs’ formidable roster.
More important than the result in a vacuum is taking into account that, while the Cavs have now won 16 of their past 18 games by an average of 15.3 points per game to draw within a half-game of Chicago for No. 3 in the Eastern Conference standings, their collective focus is totally task oriented from the next game to the next quarter to the next possession, rather than aimed on a championship come June.
“We have goals in mind and we know that in order to achieve those goals, we got to play the team in front of us and be competitive every day and just simply win as many basketball games as we can coming down the stretch here,” Cavs coach David Blatt said. "Looking behind and looking ahead, it doesn’t really serve any purpose. What we can control is what we do on the court on a daily basis and I think that for a good period of time we’ve been doing that and doing it well.”
As lousy as the Knicks are, there was some precision to the way the Cavs designed the rout, as they jumped all over New York 36-17 in the first quarter.
“That’s a mentality that I think that everyone has the same approach,” said Tristan Thompson. “We want them to call timeout first. Step on their throats. I feel like when we do that, especially on the road, if you come in and throw the first punch on the road, it kind of takes the crowd out of the game and it gets them on their heels.”
Kyrie Irving revealed earlier in the season that not only do the Cavs value shutting the opposition down from the start, but they even have a number in mind attached to the task: Hold opponents under 20 points in the first quarter.
Now that the Cavs are hitting that first-quarter mark with regularity, Thompson said they have shifted their expectations for themselves.
“I know third quarters, we’ve had a couple lapses,” Thompson said on a day the Cavs outscored New York only 19-17 in the third. “So, if you look at the games, the third quarter is when we didn’t play well defensively and that’s an area that we got to get better at. We weren’t rotating, guys were getting open shots. We weren’t playing hard enough. You got to play hard for 48 minutes.”
Winning streaks, while always providing a boost to a team’s place in the standings, can sometimes be a detriment in the long run if a team’s head gets too big and it stops working to improve.
James Jones, who was on two championship teams in Miami already, sees the Cavs taking the appropriate approach.
“Right now, you can ask every guy to a man, we’re not focused on the result,” Jones said. “We’re focused on the process. We’re going into every game saying that if we execute our defense, if we limit our turnovers, if we execute the game plan that Coach [Blatt] puts in front of us at a high clip, we’ll play good basketball.
“The times when we’re a little lax and we start to worry about the result and get ahead of ourselves, you see we struggle. We have those lulls. We aren’t playing good, cohesive basketball. We’re playing iso basketball. So, if you keep your eyes on the process knowing that you just want to be playing your best basketball when the playoffs come, it makes it a little bit easier to not get caught up in the streaks, caught up in the runs. Instead of feeling yourself, you start getting a better feel for the game.”
Sunday was a natural time to reflect on the transformative trades the Cavs pulled off to bring in J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert from New York and another former Knick, Timofey Mozgov, from Denver.
But Jones says it wasn’t just the trades that turned things around for the Cavs. Nor was it simply LeBron James coming back healthy after a two-week sabbatical to rest his body. It was finding a proper mindset.
“I think it’s just the maturation of a team,” Jones said. “You can’t discount Timo, Iman, J.R., you see how effective and how vital they are for what we’re doing. But I also think for the guys here getting the comfort level and understanding what Coach wants and seeing some progress towards what he wants, what he’s established and seeing some productivity out of that. So, whenever you have that, you start to build a confidence. You gain a confidence. You gain an identity. And I think our identity now is where we have great offensive players who are really committed to making sure we play defense first and then let our defense unlock their ability.”
Irving, one of those supreme offensive talents who now buys into the defense that Jones was referring to, summed it all up.
“We still have a long way to go, but our focus level is at an all-time high,” Irving said.
And by narrowing that focus, the Cavs are expanding their ultimate potential.
