National Basketball Association

Life without Love: The new-look Cavaliers

Published May. 4, 2015 11:10 a.m. ET

foxsports

By Miles Wray

What a bummer for Kevin Love: as a six-year veteran of the Minnesota Timberwolves, he had never made the playoffs before this season. And now, after gutting through a difficult but successful regular season with his new employer, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Love is going to miss the rest of the playoffs after having his shoulder literally ripped out of its socket by Kelly Olynyk in the first quarter of the Cavs’ Game 4, series-ending victory over the Boston Celtics.

Depth is not exactly a feature of this Cavaliers’ team. While one-time lottery pick Tristan Thompson can ably fill in at power forward in the starting lineup—Thompson started in 15 games this regular season—things could get dicey as the Cavs are forced to dig deeper into their rotations against their next opponent, the Chicago Bulls.

What has this team looked like without Love? He missed seven games during the regular season, although it was really six: in the last week of the regular season, Cleveland rested Love, LeBron James, and Kyrie Irving against, coincidentally, the Boston Celtics. In the other six games, the Cavaliers went 3–3, including a win against the Los Angeles Clippers and a loss against—gulp—the Chicago Bulls.

It was a convincing win for the Bulls. Although James scored 31 points on the night, he needed an inefficient 26 shots to get there, and he turned the ball over eight times along the way. Going by Basketball Reference’s Game Score statistic, which attempts to distill a player’s overall game performance into a single number, it was the second-worst game of at least 30 points in the entire NBA season.

Also not good for the Cavaliers on that night: sophomore Chicago wing Tony Snell, with an average of 6.0 points per game on the season, dropped 22 on Cleveland, even while being matched up against James.

While this particular matchup has little do to with the loss of Love—or J.R. Smith, who will be suspended for the first two games of the series—Derrick Rose also got 30 points in the same game, which was actually just two points shy of his season high.

Another game that Love missed came few weeks later, in March, when the Cavaliers returned to Miami, the old stomping ground for James and his troop of old veteran pals. Even though the Cavs were firing on all cylinders, with Timofey Mozgov and Iman Shumpert fully integrated into the rotation, the sub-.500 Heat beat Cleveland by 14 points. In this game, Irving went only 5-for-15 from the field, while Dwyane Wade put up 32 points in just 30 minutes. Hassan Whiteside also had one of his many double-doubles, showing along the way why little-used Cleveland backup Kendrick Perkins is so little-used.

While the Cavaliers absolutely struggled in these games without Love: they allowed a 30-point game from an opposing player only 15 times all year, and three of those came during the handful of games that Love missed. That said, the Cavaliers achieved some impressive victories even with Love on the sidelines. The Heat visited Cleveland in early April, and the Cavaliers blew them out. Also, in mid-January, when the Cavaliers were still around .500, they went into Staples Center without Love and beat the Los Angeles Clippers, 126–121.

One difference for the Cavaliers that night was that one of their two superstars, in this case Irving, had a monster game: 37 points on just 18 shots. But perhaps even more importantly, Thompson contributed a season-high 24 points, shooting 10-of-12 and getting 12 rebounds and two blocks along the way.

In that game, the Cavs used a three-man bench of Matthew Dellavedova, Shawn Marion, and Mike Miller—and the latter two have dropped out of the Cleveland rotation in the playoffs. The Cavaliers have been outscored significantly this year when Miller, fellow Heat champion James Jones, or rookie Joe Harris have been on the floor. It was Jones who got the call in Game 4 against the Celtics once Smith got rejected, and he went 0-for-6 in the game.

Cleveland’s rotation of available big men behind Thompson is even less appealing. With Anderson Varejao injured since the early part of the season, the Cavaliers have Perkins and Brendan Haywood available. Seeing either of those players in crucial playoff minutes is not exactly what Cavaliers fans had in mind for this season. Coach David Blatt is much better served rolling out smaller lineups instead of taking his chances with these two centers who have definitely passed their primes.

Cleveland can win without Love. But it’s definitely an uphill battle, and the Cavaliers will need unexpectedly great performances from players up and down their roster in order to have a chance at beating the rugged Bulls.

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