The best teams in the Eastern Conference can't get stops
LeBron James has taken it upon himself over the last week or so to decry the Cleveland Cavaliers’ lack of non-LeBron playmakers. Somebody else needs to be able to create opportunities by piercing the defense and drawing help, the thinking goes. The Cavs are on their annual “it’s the middle of the season and we’re going to the Finals in five months anyway so who cares” skid and have lost six of their last eight games, so, sure, there will be some complaining and it’s fine.
Scoring does not really seem like it’s the Cavaliers’ problem, though. Cleveland has the NBA’s sixth-best offensive efficiency this season, per NBA.com. Sure, the Cavs fall apart during the few minutes per game that LeBron sits on the bench, but that’s been true each of the last two years as well. In fact, the difference in the Cavs’ offensive efficiency with LeBron on and off the floor is actually less stark this year than it was in either of his first two seasons back in Cleveland.
No, the thing that’s holding Cleveland back from being as good as it can be this season (they’re 30-14 right now, putting them on pace for a whole one win fewer than last year) is its defense. After finishing the 2015-16 season with the league’s 10th-best point prevention unit, the Cavs have slumped back to 17th in the NBA this year. Scoring is up leaguewide so their 106.0 points per 100 possession allowed mark is not quite as big a drop from last year’s 102.3 figure as it might seem — the Cavs have gone from a defense that was 1.5 percent better than league average to one that is 0.3 percent worse than average. Still, the typical line of demarcation for a true contender is a top-10 defense, so it’s quite unusual to see a team as good as the Cavs fall below that line.
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Here’s the thing, though: they’re not alone among Eastern Conference contenders in that distinction. Each of the top three teams in the East — the Cavs, as well as the Toronto Raptors and Boston Celtics — has a defense that right now sits in the bottom half of the league. Cleveland and Toronto are in a three-way tie with Houston at 16th, while Boston checks in at 22nd. How unusual is that? Take a look at the following chart, in which we’ve helpfully highlighted the teams that finished in the bottom-half of the league in defense.
Out of the 120 teams that have finished the year with a top-3 seed in their conference over the last 20 seasons, only 10 of them (or 8.3 percent) finished that year with a bottom-half defense. Basically, one team every two years manages to finish in the top three of its conference despite having a below-average defense. Only once have two teams with bottom-half defenses snagged a top-3 spot in their conference in the same season (the 2004-05 Suns and Sonics). It has never been the case where all three top seeds had defenses closer to the bottom than the top of the league. So, we’re in uncharted waters here.
What makes this occurrence especially unusual is that just last year, Cleveland and Toronto finished 10th and 11th in defensive efficiency, while Boston finished tied for fifth. All three teams returned largely the same rosters this season, with the big change being that the Celtics brought in Al Horford — a move that was expected to shore up their top-flight defense even more and possibly elevate it to becoming the single best unit in the NBA.
It’s worth exploring, then, the specific factors that have led to each team’s defensive regression. A quick and dirty way to do that is to take a look at their performance in each of the Four Factors: shooting, fouls, turnovers, and rebounding.
The Cavaliers have put their opponents on the free-throw line less often this season, but have undermined that improvement by both allowing their opponents to make a greater percentage of their shots and by grabbing fewer of the available defensive rebounds when their opponents do miss.
The shooting defense decline isn’t necessarily limited to one area of the floor. Teams are making around one percent more of their shots against Cleveland in the restricted area, from mid-range, and from three. It mostly seems like the extra 3.1 “wide open” shots per game they’re allowing this season, per NBA.com, have led to a slight downturn in shooting defense. The defensive rebounding issues are more interesting. The Cavs aren’t a noticeably smaller team this year, but splitting minutes that had been allocated to Timofey Mozgov, Matthew Dellavedova, and J.R. Smith between Channing Frye, Richard Jefferson, Iman Shumpert, and DeAndre Liggins seems a likely contributing factor.
Toronto, meanwhile, has forced more turnovers this season — which, to be fair, has helped the Raps lead the NBA in points off turnovers per game, according to NBA.com — but that improvement has come at the expense of everything else. The Raptors are getting hammered on the glass (29th in defensive rebound percentage) and playing a defensive style that rarely forces opponents into the toughest looks. Only the Grizzlies have coaxed their opponents into fewer mid-range shots per game than the Raptors and only eight teams are putting their opponents on the free-throw line more often than the Raps. Add to that a soft interior defense and you’ve got a recipe for a drop to the bottom half of the league.
The Celtics’ bad defense is the biggest surprise but also has the most obvious root causes. First, they’ve inherited the Atlanta Hawks’ defensive rebounding issues — not all that big a surprise after they signed Horford this summer. Next, they’ve had injuries to basically every single one of their good defenders. Horford, Avery Bradley, Jae Crowder, and Kelly Olynyk have all missed time this season, and the Celtics haven’t really had a chance to have everyone healthy all at once for an extended period. That’s led to defensive lapses that ordinarily wouldn’t happen with defenders of their individual talent level, and those lapses, in turn, have resulted in opponents being able to take better care of the ball (they’ve dropped from third to 15th in opponent’s turnover rate) and getting better looks at the basket.
How correctable are the issues for these three teams? Well, it depends who you’re talking about. The Cavaliers seem to have another defensive gear in them, as they’ve shown in each of their last two playoff runs. LeBron can ramp things up in May and (mostly) June and they can situationally deploy their poor rebounders only in advantageous matchups. It’s a bit trickier for the Raptors and Celtics, whose issues seem more roster and health-related than anything else. Both teams have been rebounding poorly all year and barring a trade, seem likely to continue struggling with that aspect of the game. It’s difficult but not impossible to suddenly stop fouling or start creating turnovers, and opponent’s shooting can often be subject to random streaks. Needing your opponent to go on a cold streak, though, isn’t an ideal situation to be in.
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