CLEVELAND — Every time you want to believe the Cleveland Cavaliers have turned over a new leaf, they show you that they haven’t.
After their most inspiring win of the Donovan Mitchell era in Game 5, they laid an egg at home, blowing the perfect opportunity to punch their ticket to the Eastern Conference Finals with a 21-point loss to the Detroit Pistons.
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Now, they’ll head on the road for a do-or-die Game 7 in Detroit.
Basketball teams often take on the persona of their best player. They’re built to accent that player’s skills and cover up their weaknesses. Throw in the soft power that player typically weilds within the organization, and it’s easy to see how you get to this point.
In many ways, Mitchell’s shortcomings are a microcosm of the team’s as a whole.
When things are perfectly clicking into place, Mitchell’s individual talent — combined with the skilled pieces that by-and-large fit well around him — makes him seem like one of the best players in the world. And by extension, the Cavs can look unbeatable
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The second half of Game 4 is a perfect example of this. Mitchell was scoring at will, tying the record for the most individual points in a half for a playoff game, against the best defense in the conference. The Cavs were humming and unsurprisingly also looked like a juggernaut.
However, when things have gotten rocky for Mitchell, that has also happened for the Cavs. James Harden has helped slightly change this dynamic. His stabilizing force in Game 5, combined with Evan Mobley’s skill on both ends, pulled them out of the rut. But it isn’t their jobs to do that every night at this point in their careers.
This is Mitchell’s team. It still goes as he does.
Both the Toronto Raptors and the Pistons were seemingly engineered to keep Mitchell from doing what he does best. They’ve been able to throw multiple rangy defenders at him that can match both his speed and strength in a way that no other opponent in Mitchell’s previous eight playoff runs have. This has made it difficult for him to get to his spots and leaves his scoring too dependent on a streaky jumper.
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And when he has an off-night, as he did in Game 6, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
The Cavs played their worst basketball with Mitchell on the court. They were outscored by 25 points in the 37 minutes he played, and it felt like more in the arena.
Mitchell put it on himself to lead the team. He took a game-high 20 shots, most of which came off driving into the teeth of the defense. Mitchell’s superpower is his ability to get to the basket and finish seemingly at will. But that skill was absent yet again. Only three of his 11 attempts from the paint fell.
“I can’t dwell on it, I missed shots tonight,” Mitchell said. “Do I think some of them were tougher shots that I could’ve gotten better? Sure, but I can say that about every game. I’m not here to look at the fact I missed shots. It’s the overall force and impact on the game.”
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The overall force and impact on the game were the real issues, and have been for four years now.
Mitchell has no offensive counters outside of finding other ways to score.
He isn’t a skilled distributor. Either an inability to see the correct reads or an unwillingness to make the pass has limited Mitchell throughout his career. He’s yet to record more than five assists through 13 playoff games with a paltry assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.15. That’s unacceptable for someone operating that much on ball.
Assists aren’t the only measure of whether someone’s a well-rounded offensive player. However, it’s difficult to argue that someone is if they’re consistently coming up short in this key area.
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Combine that with not being an off-ball mover and being a bad point-of-attack defender, and you have a player who’s only valuable on-ball and scoring at a high clip.
These individual issues affect the whole team. It’s difficult for teammates to buy in with off-ball movement if there’s no chance they will be rewarded for their effort. Defense then becomes more difficult if you aren’t getting the energy on the offensive side of the ball. And in the end, this leads to a group that has consistently looked lifeless in the biggest moments and can’t really put their finger on why.
After the game, head coach Kenny Atkinson said that he didn’t think his team met the challenge physically. Harden was asked why they didn’t come out with intensity, and he responded with, “That’s a great question.”
When Mitchell comes out flat, the team consistently has a well. This has happened far too often in the playoffs to conclude otherwise.
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Cade Cunningham’s performance was the exact opposite of what we saw from Mitchell.
He wasn’t perfect. Cunningham still turned it over seven times, which is far too many for a player that skilled. But his ability to influence the game in other ways rubbed off on his team.
The Cavs came into this game with an “ABC approach” — anybody but Cade.
Instead of trying to beat that challenge all by himself, Cunningham trusted his teammates when Cleveland double-teamed him. This resulted in eight assists for himself, but also allowed everyone else to find a rhythm. His willingness to move the ball and allow his teammates to take advantage led to Detroit’s offense clicking on all cylinders.
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“You just have to make the play that’s there,” Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said.
Cunningham doesn’t let up defensively either. He’s been physical at the point of attack all series and has done a good job of making life difficult for Cleveland’s smaller guards.
Add that all up, and you have a team that’s energized on both ends and a star that is influencing the game in a wide variety of ways.
Anything can happen in Game 7.
The series isn’t yet by any stretch. Even though the Cavs blew a golden opportunity to end this series, we know that they can win in Detroit.
But that isn’t going to happen if Mitchell has another bad game like this. He simply needs to be better.
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This is his chance to change the narrative.
“Everything we want is on the other side of hard,” Mitchell said. “We had an opportunity, we missed it, and we’ll have another opportunity on Sunday. That’s the mindset.”
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