Who’s up for Cavaliers-Knicks II?
We’re only halfway through the season, and the Feb. 8 trade deadline could still shake things up, but even with those caveats, it already seems like we’re headed toward a spicy Cleveland-New York rematch in the first round of the playoffs. And here’s the twist: It’s likely we’ll be seeing a much better version of each team this time around.
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Sure, I’m getting ahead of myself, but I’m going to call my shot now and say this will be the matchup, and that it will be the best series of the first round. Setting aside all the where-will-Donovan-Mitchell-play-next noise, this is exciting: The Knicks and Cavs are both rolling right now and still flying somewhat under the radar.
A season ago, Cleveland won 51 games, and New York won 47; both are on pace to improve on that figure slightly, despite Cleveland sustaining multiple injuries in the first half of the season and New York losing starting center Mitchell Robinson. Each looks poised to be even better in the second half as well — Cleveland by getting its players back, and the Knicks via their recent trade for OG Anunoby and the decent-sized likelihood they add another guard by the deadline.
And yet … moving into the Eastern Conference’s top three would seem a gargantuan feat for each. The Philadelphia 76ers, Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics are each on pace for win totals in the mid-to-high 50s, a stratosphere neither Cleveland nor New York seems likely to reach. Barring an injury to one of their stars, those three clubs seem unlikely to come back to earth and give these two a chance to pass them.
Beneath them, meanwhile, the Pascal Siakam-infused Indiana Pacers are a threat, and the Miami Heat can never be counted out (even if their offense has gone off the rails lately). However, the Cavs and Knicks have built multiple-game leads on both, and New York, in particular, has a more advantageous remaining schedule; the Knicks have played a league-high 24 road games already.
Here’s why I’m fascinated by Cavs-Knicks Redux, though: I think it could be a much different series this time around. Both teams have taken offense and spacing much more seriously this season, likely in response to the slog that was the 2023 postseason for both.
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We all remember how Cleveland’s offense flamed out in that first-round series, with just a 103.4 offensive rating (the postseason league average was 113.5). What some might forget was the Knicks actually shot even worse but were bailed out by a monstrous performance on the offensive glass; New York then went on to post a meager 107.5 offensive rating in its second-round loss to the Heat.
Both teams have taken pains to fix those weaknesses. Take Cleveland, for instance, which has won seven straight games entering Monday despite missing both Evan Mobley and Darius Garland and sits at a comfy 25-15 even with its core four of Mitchell, Garland, Mobley and Jarrett Allen combining for 53 absences. On Saturday, the Cavs rolled into Atlanta without Mobley, Garland or Caris LeVert, took 43s — more than half their shots! — and made 16 of them and thumped the Hawks 116-95. Mitchell only took six of those triples; role players at the two, three and four positions launched 35 of them.
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Lloyd: Injuries forced the Cavs to find a new way to play. They don't plan on going back
That’s quite a contrast with a year ago, when the Knicks knew they only had to worry about two Cleveland players (Garland and Mitchell) on the perimeter and slowly strangled the Cavs’ offense. It was so bad that the Cavs’ Game 1 starting small forward, Isaac Okoro, became unplayable by Game 3.
Fast forward a season, and these Cavs look very, very different. Of their regulars, Garland is now only seventh on the team in 3-point frequency. Newcomers Max Strus, Georges Niang and Sam Merrill (technically a late 2023 addition, though he never played) each take more than 11 triples per 100 possessions, while holdovers Dean Wade, LeVert and Okoro are shooting 3s with far greater frequency than a year ago.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t show up in the 3-point numbers, but Allen has become much more willing to let it rip from 15 to 18 feet while operating on the elbows, not to mention more able: He’s over 50 percent on midrangers for the season! That, too, has opened up the floor more for Cleveland. (It’s also calmed down some of the trade noise around Allen after last year’s playoff disappointment; he’s played some of the best basketball of his career during Mobley’s absence.)
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Overall, the Cavs have gone from 17th in 3-point attempt rate a season ago to seventh this season, but the really instructive part is the 3s that aren’t from Mitchell or Garland. Those two are the ones handling the ball to initiate plays, and they are actually launching less often (19.5 combined 3s per 100 possessions, compared to 22.5 last season). It’s the Cavs’ floor spacers who are doing all the damage, opening the court for the guards to get to more valuable spots.
“Our aim is to make defenses have to make tough decisions,” Cavs coach J.B Bickerstaff said of the shooting they’ve added around Mitchell. “We gave our guys the green light to go out and get as many 3s as we can, but we want them to be quality in how we create them, more catch-and-shoot as opposed to putting it on the floor and getting your own.”
The plan is for that approach to carry over when Garland and Mobley return.
“We obviously understand you want to get as many layups as you possibly can, but with our personnel that’s there now, we can stretch the floor, we’ve got quick triggers and no conscience, so we want to take advantage of that.
The Knicks, meanwhile, have improved most obviously at the other end. Already having improved from 18th a season ago to eighth this season in defense, they’ve taken another step since trading for Anunoby. The Knicks gave up 140 points to Indiana the night of the trade but have been in lockdown mode ever since, with only the Dallas Mavericks eclipsing 110 points in the 11 games since, nine of which were Knicks wins.
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Is OG Anunoby the missing piece that takes Knicks to an even higher level? So far, yes!
However, there’s an offensive component here too. While Anunoby by himself doesn’t change the spacing equation that much, the player he replaced (RJ Barrett) wasn’t a 3-point threat; at 34.6 percent career on low volume, opponents would slough off him in the playoffs. Anunoby is a good shooter, from the corners especially, who shoots 3s more often than Barrett and is at 37.6 percent career from deep. The deal cost New York a high-volume 3-point shooter in Immanuel Quickley, but many of his minutes will be soaked up by other volume shooters (Quentin Grimes, Donte DiVincenzo).
It’s only 11 games so far, but having one more must-guard player in the mix should have the same salutary effect on Jalen Brunson as Cleveland’s changes do for Mitchell and Garland. Additionally, the Knicks may not be done; while the Cavs are out of assets given what they gave up to acquire Mitchell, New York is still primed to make another move.
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These teams split a pair of ugly games in the first week of the season, and they’ll only see each other one more time this season, March 3 in Cleveland. Nonetheless, keep your eyes on these two. The East’s Celtics-Bucks-Sixers holy trinity deservedly soaks up a lot of our attention, while New York and Cleveland haven’t yet shown they can hang at the highest playoff levels. But if there’s a sleeper in the East, it’s one of these two. And even if not, I’m still excited to see how Cavs-Knicks II plays out this spring.
Stat Geekery: The NBA’s load management memo
The NBA’s long-awaited release of its study on load management finally came to pass recently, with the league announcing the study’s conclusion that load management didn’t seem to reduce injuries.
Then, teams went right on load managing their guys, with San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama sitting out Friday in Charlotte and Al Horford taking a DNP-rest Sunday in Houston. While there is some evidence that teams are doing less of it than in previous seasons — most notably the Clippers and Bucks — we aren’t in peak “load management” season yet, which usually happens as wear and tear builds up in the second half of the season.
I spent my weekend perusing the league’s report (between that and rearranging my sock drawer, it was a wild Friday night), and while it does factually say load management hasn’t been shown to reduce injuries, this is not the same thing as saying, “Load management doesn’t work.” Not even remotely.
In addition to the eye roll I’ve gotten from several front-office folks regarding this report — you know, the people with the most financial interest in correct, actionable information, as opposed to the people with the most financial interest in having the stars play all 82 games — my own read of the report is that the league buried a far more interesting conclusion.
To be clear, the league’s study excluded all payers who had a multi-game injury in the season in question — an interesting design choice, first of all, but also one that then limits the “Load management doesn’t work” conclusion further to exclude most of the league by the All-Star break. We’re halfway through the season, and only eight of the league’s top 20 players in PER would still qualify for the study. (This approach also limits the sample size further.)
More importantly, the study suffers mightily from the giant elephant in the room that there is no control group. That’s just a fact of any study on a pro sports league like this — you can’t get half the league to volunteer to be the “before” — and makes it virtually impossible to say definitely that a trend doesn’t exist. You can only say your study didn’t find a connection.
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David Weiss, the league’s senior vice president of player matters, said this part explicitly last week, and it’s an important point: “To be clear, we also lack evidence that load management fails to reduce injuries. We just don’t have evidence that it does.”
Coupled with the already-existing issue of small sample sizes that plague virtually any NBA study (with only five on the court, there just aren’t that many players, period; try studying just older players, as one section of the study did, and the samples become minuscule), and the difficulty in defining rest and injury situations in a scientifically satisfactory way, and you can see how this can get in the mud real fast.
Additionally, the league’s report may actually unwittingly prove the opposite of what it hoped, once you get into the nitty-gritty.
The second issue with any study of load management is that the player sample is non-random. Which players do you suppose are the ones most likely to sit for load management games? The youngest and healthiest? Yeah, not so much. Teams sit players when they think their tanks are empty and they’re at their most vulnerable to being hurt.
So … if the players being rested are on some level the ones teams feel are the most in danger, and their injury rate post-load management is the same as the baseline rate for the rest of the league … couldn’t you also take that as evidence that load management worked?
The league’s study even alludes to this fact on Page 19, stating:
One potential interpretation of the null results observed from analyses that excluded 1-game absences due to injury is that missing games for rest or load management was successful in reducing a “high-risk” player’s injury risk to something more similar to other players’ injury risk (i.e., games missed for rest or load management prevented players’ injury risk from increasing).
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It then goes on to mention three less-than-convincing reasons why that notion could then be ruled out.
There are other notions in the study you might also quibble with, and in the bigger picture, the league office is not the only one questioning whether the juice on load management is always worth the squeeze.
However, the report also tacked onto the end a section that was perhaps at least as interesting as its headline conclusion on load management. It studied travel, schedules and injuries and concluded there was essentially no correlation between back-to-backs, long trips or dense schedule stretches and injury rates in those games.
That doesn’t mean resting players on back-to-backs or in dense schedule stretches might still make sense (there’s the long-term wear of a season to consider, and some older players are bad enough in back-to-backs that you might as well). Also, the report says nothing about the quality of play (there’s a well-documented decline in teams’ quality of play in back-to-backs or travel-heavy stretches, especially in first quarters). But if anything in this report was going to influence a team’s behavior, this might — already we’ve seen a few teams insert load management days into light schedule stretches to afford their players a stretch of several days to recover.
Prospect of the Week: Ryan Dunn, 6-8 sophomore PF, Virginia
(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best prospect of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)
I stopped by Georgia Tech on Saturday to see the Yellow Jackets take on Virginia, but this wasn’t just a fanboy trip to see my alma mater. Virginia also has a potential first-rounder in Ryan Dunn, an athletic sophomore forward who has wowed with his defensive ability in particular. Despite paying in a conservative defensive scheme, Dunn has averaged 4.9 blocks and 4.4 steals per 100 possessions this season, a Matisse Thybulle-esque “stocks” rate that hints at elite defensive potential. (In his senior season at Washington, Thybulle averaged 11.4 stocks per 100 possessions, the best mark I’ve seen from a non-center prospect; Dunn’s 9.4 as a sophomore exceeded what Thybulle did in his sophomore and junior seasons.)
For instance, if you pardon the extreme zoom-out, here’s Dunn picking up a guard on a switch and swatting his drive off the glass:
🆃🅷🅴 🅱🅻🅾🅲🅺
ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴜᴄᴋᴇᴛ pic.twitter.com/taBIrU9vV9— Virginia Men's Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) January 18, 2024
Dunn had several impressive defensive plays in Virginia’s win on Saturday; Georgia Tech’s post players wouldn’t even look at the basket when Dunn covered them, and he flew out of nowhere to reject guards’ jump shots on multiple occasions.
Dunn also showed his athleticism whit a monstrous tip dunk (see below); his rebound rate of 15.2 percent from the forward spot bodes well for his ability to hold his own at the four in the pros.
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( •_•)>⌐■-■
(•_•) W O A H pic.twitter.com/sxwPW23fnP
— Virginia Men's Basketball (@UVAMensHoops) January 20, 2024
However, much like with Thybulle, the question with Dunn is whether his offense can keep him on the floor for his defense to shine. Dunn made an open catch-and-shoot 3 on Saturday but is shooting just 25 percent from 3 on his 24 attempts this season. He also is a career 55.3 percent foul shooter. In addition, the rest of his offensive game isn’t so highly developed to offset that; Dunn averages 22.3 points per 100 possessions on 18.7 percent usage, which is really modest stuff from a first-round prospect.
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For the rest of this season, traveling scouts will be watching Virginia’s pregame work closely, keeping an eye on Dunn’s shooting form through all those reps (much better than watching 24 shots on Synergy) to define how fixable his issues are in an NBA program. But in a weak draft, the idea of an NBA-ready defender is alluring, especially one at his size who can switch across the positional spectrum.
(Top photo of Donovan Mitchell and Jalen Brunson: David Richard / USA Today)
