NEW YORK — So … worst loss in Cleveland Cavaliers history?
I suppose the answer lies in what ultimately happens in this Eastern Conference finals. If, somehow, the Cavs recover against the New York Knicks, then this one will sink to the bottom of the Hudson River.
But being on the wrong end of the second-largest fourth-quarter comeback in NBA playoff history? Sue us if we’re thinking it’s the Cavs with their feet in concrete, plunging into very cold, very dark waters.
“We (expletive) blew it,” Donovan Mitchell conceded.
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Yes. In case you turned off Tuesday’s Game 1 with about, oh, 7:41 left, silenced your phone off and washed down a sleeping pill, Cleveland’s 22-point lead, 93-71, became a 115-104 loss in overtime to the Knicks.
If this is you, if you did this (IT WAS YOU), well, the moment you hit the power button, the Cavs had a 99.9 percent chance to win. Dating to the 1997-98 season, teams trailing by 22 or more points in the fourth quarter were 1-594.
It took a 44-11 run by the Knicks to pull off what they just pulled off.
It was an astonishing collapse by the Cavs, filled with obvious mental errors and physical mistakes, questionable strategies all across the board, a smoking-hot Jalen Brunson and, yes, maybe a lucky bounce here or there in the Knicks’ favor.
The Cavs seemed to simply allow the Knicks, through Brunson, to target James Harden over and over on defense down the stretch. Brunson scored 15 of his 38 points in the fourth quarter, on 7-of-9 shooting, with only one 3-pointer. Not all those points were scored on Harden, but Cleveland didn’t react nearly fast enough to get Harden help or take him off the floor. The Knicks exploited the matchup.
“We adjusted to that,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said, in a respectful but defiant tone. “We started sending two at (Brunson), get the ball out of his hands. … (Harden has) been one of our best defenders in the playoffs. I trust him. Smart, great hands. I didn’t think about (taking him out).”
Harden was also brutal offensively in the fourth quarter, missing five of his six attempts from the field. Up until Brunson ignited, Mitchell was the best offensive player on the floor. He scored 29 points but was just 1-of-4 in the fourth quarter and didn’t score in overtime. Overall, the Cavs shot just 5-of-17 in the fourth and 1-of-7 in overtime. They committed five turnovers in the final 17 minutes, but those mistakes weren’t nearly as costly as the bad defense and the stagnant offense, with Harden running isolation and missing shot after shot, then being targeted time and again on the other end.
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The luck — good if you’re New York, bad if you’re Cleveland — was a 3-pointer by Landry Shamet that bounced on the rim and in to tie the score with 45 seconds left, and a 3 from Sam Merrill at the buzzer in regulation that rolled around the rim and fell out. The Cavs could’ve just as easily collapsed and still won on that Merrill shot, but it didn’t go down.
Beyond that, Atkinson had two timeouts he could’ve used late in the fourth quarter and didn’t. The Cavs have played every other day for more than two weeks now, and Atkinson mentioned fatigue as a factor in the meltdown.
“I’m super proud of the way our group played,” Atkinson said. “We played great basketball tonight for three quarters. Unfortunate fourth quarter.”
“Got a little unlucky,” he added.
Mitchell refused to blame tired legs, or perhaps complacency with such a big lead, as factors in the loss.
“Even if there was complacency, we’re up 22 with God knows how much time. Eight minutes? Gotta win the game,” Mitchell said, calling it a “bad loss.”
This is the worst of the worst for the Cavs. Go back to the J.R. Smith game, Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals, when LeBron James scored 51 points and the Cavs were in prime position to pull the upset. But the Golden State Warriors were so heavily favored in the series that, in hindsight, Cleveland wasn’t going to win it, anyway.
Game 3 of the 2017 finals was a bummer. The wide-open Kyle Korver 3 in the corner that missed, followed by a Kevin Durant dagger, and the Warriors took the game by closing on an 11-0 run. That was a series Cleveland could have made extremely interesting.
Beyond those two, maybe one of the losses to the Boston Celtics in 2010, LeBron’s last year with the Cavs before leaving for the Miami Heat? Or how about “The Shot,” from Michael Jordan in 1989? That one ended a series in which the Cavs were actually the higher seed, but it was in the first round.
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That’s the unpleasant company the current Cavs are keeping this morning. And what happened Tuesday at Madison Square Garden stands to be the worst loss in franchise history because, unlike the 2018 finals, Cleveland is not, on the court, a decided underdog. The Knicks are favored, sure, but the Cavs have enough firepower and experience to win the series. Unlike the 2017 finals or the other sad stories mentioned, this was at the start of a series, when Cleveland had every chance to set a specific tone and steal home-court advantage in a series it could otherwise make extremely competitive. And the Cavs just gift-wrapped and hand-delivered to the Knicks a win they had no business getting.
The only way to kick those lowlights out of their living room is to get off the mat.
That’s what the players and coaches were talking about late Tuesday night. Yes, this was bad, but … “we could have lost by 40, and we would still be down 1-0,” Mitchell said.
“We’ve done it before,” Evan Mobley added.
“We’ve been really good at responding and coming back and bouncing back. So, it’s no different,” Harden said.
To be fair, the Cavs have shown a knack for shaking off what you would think is a supreme disappointment and playing the next game like nothing of the sort happened. Something similar happened to the Knicks in Game 1 of the conference finals last year, too. New York was up 17 on the Indiana Pacers in the fourth quarter, only to blow the lead to force overtime, during which Tyrese Haliburton’s bouncing 3-ball won it at the buzzer.
The Knicks recovered enough to make it a series. The Pacers needed six games to advance to the finals.
The opportunity to go home happy with the series tied at 1 is still available to the Cavs with a win in Thursday’s Game 2, but to do it, they will have to not only wash from their mouths the bitter taste of such a catastrophic defeat but also actively learn to avoid letting the Knicks exploit their deficiencies in crunch time.
If they fail to do either, then what you just witnessed was, likely, the worst loss in Cavs history.
M
· 7h 37m ago
One of the worst coaching performances I have ever seen.
Besides being killed by the same play over and over, Atkinson watched his team choke away a 22 point lead lead on an 18-1 run before taking a timeout.
Absolutely inexcusable, I would be livid if I were a Cavs fan.
· 6h 23m ago
Have been a fan of Atkinson since his days with the Nets, but he’s gotta take the fall for this. The Head Coach has got to read the room and aggressively act to stop the momentum, particularly with an awakening MSG and Brunson catching fire. Burn timeouts, change rotations, something, anything rather than passively stick to a plan that’s visibly failing. No way this lead should have been blown.
G
· 7h 3m ago
Despite what Atkinson may say, Harden stopped taking defense seriously a long time ago. Usually you live with that because of what he brings offensively, but to leave him in the game as he’s missing all his shots, taking the ball out of Mitchell’s hands in the clutch, and turning in possibly the worst individual defensive performance I’ve ever seen in a game of that magnitude is absolutely inexplicable.