CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Cavaliers picked up one of their most impressive wins of the season, as they downed the New York Knicks 109-94 after losing their previous two meetings.
Knicks head coach Mike Brown didn’t take the bait when asked pregame if his team lost something they could exploit against the Cavs since they don’t have two smaller guards after swapping out Darius Garland for James Harden.
“I don’t necessarily think that,” Brown said diplomatically.
Brown did, however, go into all the ways that Harden changes the offensive dynamic. It isn’t that the Cavs necessarily want to do different things; they’re just better at doing so due to his size and strength.
“Your backside [defense] has to be on point. Your transition [defense] has to be on point because everybody wants to run because he’s great at throwing that long pass. There are a lot of things you have to pay attention to. At the end of the day, they still have Donovan (Mitchell).”
They also still have Jarrett Allen, who’s playing the best basketball of his career.
Unlike Sunday against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Allen was an active part of the offense early, which led to him controlling the paint on both ends. He finished with 19 points on 7-8 shooting to go along with 10 big rebounds.
Performances like this have become the norm in February, to the point that his teammates are jokingly referring to this version of Allen as “Black History Month J.A.” In February, he’s averaging 21.4 points, 11.9 rebounds, and 1.3 blocks per game on 74% shooting.
Allen has been one of the best centers in the league during that stretch, and it was all spurred on by head coach Kenny Atkinson challenging him several weeks back when it was announced Evan Mobley would be a few weeks with a calf strain.
“He told me you’re going to have to pick it up,” Allen said. “You’re gonna have to make up for the loss of rim protection, lost offensive ability, and I took it to heart.”
It’s fair to say Allen has. And the Cavs have been at their best this season when he’s actively involved in the offense. They’re now 19-2 when he’s scored 15 or more points in a game. His rim pressure simply opens everything up for the offense, and that’s even more true after the addition of Harden.
The two-man game between Harden and Allen is lethal, given how well their skillsets match.
“He understands when to roll to the basket, when to short roll, when to find the pocket, screening angles, different things like that,” Harden said. “He’s so athletic, he gets into the role, to the screen, out of the screen so fast, which you know, I got to get used to that.”
Allen’s grasp of how to do these things pairs incredibly well with someone like Harden, who may be the best pick-and-roll manipulator in the history of the game.
“Just his patience,” Allen said. “He’s not going to force any lob…He’s not going to try to make the hero play. He’s going to try to pick the other team apart. Just try to understand their defense and try to make the right play.”
This play is a great example of how Allen’s feel and Harden’s patience can work in tandem.
Here, Allen sets a high screen for Harden, but holds it long enough to get OG Anunoby to trail on the play, forcing Karl Anthony-Towns to step up. Instead of Harden trying to blow by Towns, he slowly strings him out across the court, creating more separation between him and the roller. By the time Harden delivers the pass to Allen, the only thing the defense can do is foul or give up what would be an easy lay-in with how far out of position they are.
Good players can create mismatches and advantages. Great ones can amplify those advantages to consistently break a defense.
Harden processes the game at such a high level. He can diagnose and dissect what is happening in real time, allowing him to make the correct decision seemingly whenever he’s running the pick-and-roll.
“The first option is myself scoring the basketball off the pick-and-roll,” Harden said. “Then it’s the big, and then, once they figure that out, then it trickles down to the corner threes and the pull-behind guys and so forth.”
Allen said after the game that the offense has been clicking because they’ve been able to repeatedly run the same set and consistently score.
The Cavs have been able to do that with the pick-and-roll. It’s such a simple action, but when you run it correctly, there’s seemingly unlimited positive outcomes.
This is a good example of that. The Knicks know that they want to get the ball to Allen, so they crash to keep that from happening. This leads to the kickout to Dean Wade. But in the shuffle, the off-balance defense lost Allen, which set up another easy dunk inside.
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The Cavs have become a one-play Madden spammer. But no matter what the defense does, it’s nearly impossible to take away all the possible outcomes if it’s run correctly. Someone is bound to be left alone. It just comes down to execution at that point.
Being able to lean on the pick-and-roll has made the offensive adjustment easy; the same can’t be said for the defense, even on a night they held the Knicks under 100 points.
The defensive strategy has been simple since the trades: protect the rim at all costs and live with the three-point variance. These last two games show how differently that can play out depending on the night.
It didn’t work against the Thunder. They hit over half of their threes. Conversely, the Knicks converted just 27% of them, which led to their offense sputtering, particularly in the third quarter when they went 1-12 from three and essentially lost the game in that span.
Playing this way is a good short-term strategy, but it may not be how this team reaches its ceiling. That’s why both Allen and Harden brought up the defense as an area of concern postgame, even though they just held one of the best offenses in the league to only 94 points.
“Defense is going to be the key,” Harden said. “If we can find a way to really hone in defensively, and really get stops and limit teams to one shot, we’re going to be very, very tough.”
The Cavs are a better team now than they were the previous two times they played the Knicks. Swapping out an injured Garland for Harden has drastically changed the offense, as has finding legit bench contributors in Dennis Schroder and Keon Ellis, who’ve done an incredible job of stabilizing the second unit.
In their Christmas Day meeting, the Cavs got up big in the third quarter, but coughed it all up in the fourth due to an inability to execute offensively, combined with poor defensive rebounding.
Tuesday night was different as they simply kept their foot on the gas, never giving the Knicks any hope that they could come back from their 18-point deficit at the end of the third. This speaks to how much more prepared the Cavs are to face elite opponents, despite their limited time together.
“I think we’re pretty good, but the crazy part is, we’ve had two practices (since the trade),” Mitchell said. “There’s some groups out there where we’re just playing off [feel]. Like, Dennis came in and created this play for me the first game we’ve got here, and we’ve been runnnig that. … We’ve just been going off film and going off our IQ. … Thats a credit to the guys coming in here.”
The scary thing is that the Cavs believe they’re nowhere near their ceiling for this group.
“We’ll continue to get better and better,” Mitchell said. “The fact that were doing what we’ve been doing at a high level without much time together, it speaks to a lot, but we’re not even close to where we want to be. We have a lot more we can figure out.”
