The Cavaliers Hit A New Low By Getting Destroyed By The Knicks At Home

The Cavs have been struggling of late, losing three of their last four going against mediocre to middling teams in the NBA heading into Sunday night’s contest against the pitiful Knicks. The first loss was of the blowout variety to the Magic, the next a closer game on the road against Brooklyn, and then they got run off the floor by the Pelicans in New Orleans on Saturday.

All of those games were bad, but you could point to something that was the reason. The Magic loss was on the second night of a back-to-back after they thumped a good Bucks team on the road. The Nets are a scrappy team that has been surprisingly competitive this season and that game was again on a back-to-back. The Pelicans have Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins.

However, the loss on Sunday, while on the second night of a back-to-back, was their worst of the season.

After taking that beating at the hands of the Pelicans, Cleveland returned home to face the lowly Knicks, who came into the game at 1-3 on the season. New York has Kristaps Porzingis and then a rag-tag supporting cast led by rookie point guard Frank Ntilikina, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Enes Kanter. If there were ever a game to bounce back and put fears to rest, this was it.

Instead, the Knicks hammered the Cavs on their home floor to the tune of a 114-95 beatdown that was never close, with New York taking a 29-19 lead after the first quarter. Porzingis had 32 points, taking advantage of the Cavs soft interior defense, but that can be understood. He’s a star level player.

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What wasn’t acceptable was getting torched by Tim Hardaway Jr. Hardaway Jr. is a fine offensive player capable of these outbursts, but he tends to be wildly inefficient and, if you simply try, you can usually get him to settle for poor shot selection. On Sunday, Hardaway Jr. had 34 points on 11-of-19 shooting and got to the free throw line for eight attempts. The Cavs made the man that made the Knicks a punchline this offseason for giving him a $71 million deal look like he was worth every penny.

It’s early in the season and the Cavs still have LeBron James so there’s a floor to how bad they can be, however, I don’t think anyone would’ve thought the floor for a team with James would be losses to the Knicks, Nets, and Magic in the first seven games of the season. The veteran additions to the backcourt in place of Kyrie Irving have been a disaster defensively. Offensively, the Cavs look stagnant and they look even worse than they might be in that regard because no one other than Kyle Korver seems capable of consistently knocking down an open jumper — non-Korver Cavs were 7-of-28 from three-point range on Sunday.

The problem for Cleveland is that there aren’t any obvious answers to their problems. The best source of hope is that when Isaiah Thomas returns, he comes back from his hip injury as good as he was last year in a career year and their offense is so lethal that it doesn’t matter that their defense is bad (because adding Thomas won’t help their defense much at all). Beyond that, it’s hope J.R. Smith, Jae Crowder, and Kevin Love start knocking down shots and everyone somehow gets on the same page on defense.

The former could happen, but the latter seems far less likely because, even if they are on the same page, the majority of their players are below-average individual defenders. We’ll find out just how much the organization believes in Tyronn Lue if these struggles continue (and how much LeBron likes him), because his seat will undoubtedly get warmer if they get to 2018 as a middling squad. LeBron and Lue both insist that they’re fine, pointing to it being October.

They’re probably right to an extent. In the East, the Cavs aren’t going to miss the playoffs. They’ll likely still be a top-four seed, still, too. But the problems for this team seem to be a lot bigger than simply needing to try more and something that will be fixed by “flipping the switch” later in the year as they gear up for the playoffs.