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CLEVELAND — There weren’t a lot of good things to take away from the Cleveland Cavaliers embarassing 130-120 loss to the tanking Dallas Mavericks. Max Strus’s 24-point season debut was one of them.
Strus looked like he hadn’t missed a beat as he drained six of his seven threes. More than that, he provided help on the glass and a compete level on defense that this team has sorely missed at times.
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“It was a pretty amazing performance after seven months of not playing an NBA game,” head coach Kenny Atkinson said of Strus. “Maybe the best I’ve seen.”
Strus’s brilliant season debut was wasted by Cleveland’s lackadaisical defense.
Atkinson wasn’t shy when talking about what went wrong defensively. He called the defense “permissive,” said Dallas “never felt them,” and that the effort was “inexcusable.”
“It really comes down to guarding the ball,” Atkinson said.
The Cavs didn’t do that. They allowed Dallas to get into the paint whenever they wanted to. And then when they did, the help defense wasn’t quick enough to stop them at the rim. This led to the Mavericks converting 81% (87th percentile) of their shots at the rim.
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And the rare time the help defense was there, the rotations weren’t, which led to Dallas connecting on 50% of their threes (95th percentile) and 75% of their corner triples (97th percentile).
“If you don’t contain the ball, it’s a trigger,” Donovan Mitchell said. “When you get beat, then the next man rotates, and now they’re swinging to the corner. You go to the corner, they swing again, and the guy drives. It’s unpredictable basketball, which makes teams elite. … That’s where we got to be better, and it starts on the ball.”
This would be concerning enough on its own. This performance, coming against a team that entered this game 27th in offensive rating while also without multiple key players in Klay Thompson (rest), Daniel Gafford (illness), and Dereck Lively (foot), makes it even more alarming.
“We’ve got to go out there and figure it out as a group collectively,” Mitchell said. “It’s not just the guy on…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/7-takeaways-cavs-humiliating-130-100000789.html
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Publish date : 2026-03-16 10:00:00
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