Game 13: L

Don’t look now but the Cavs’ guard play as of late has been terrible, and it’s no surprise that the team has been dropping games (and coming close to dropping games). With under a minute to go in the fourth quarter in yesterday’s loss to the Pacers, the Cavs had scored in the second half as many points and they scored in the first quarter. How does this happen? Well, at this point in the fourth quarter the Cavs’ had two assists in the entire second half, which is a fairly incredible stat. If you happened to switch over to ESPN after the Cavs game to take in a little of the Suns/Nets game you would have been witness to the sort of things that can happen when a team has a great point guard. In the first quarter of that game the Suns shot 16-19 (84%).  The Suns weren’t shooting particularly well so much as they were taking a lot of very easy shots. Why? Because Steve Nash in a tremendous point guard, capable of creating open shots for his teammates seemingly at will. In the first quarter he had six assists, and if my numbers are correct of the 16 made field goals 14 were assisted. My guess is that assisted shooting percentage is much higher than unassisted shooting percentage (anyone have any idea if anyone keeps this stat?), and when the Cavs score all of nine points in a quarter it’s not much of a stretch to think that the low total is directly linked to a dearth of assists.

Once again the front court played well (only Marshall was a below-average player [-.351]; Gooden was the most above-average [.108]). This is the standard for the Cavs. Whatever you think of revolving door that is the PF/C, it is working fairly well. Gooden is having a career season. Ilgauskas is finally finding a level of comfort in the offense and defense, as evidenced by his recent performances: in four of the last five games Z has been an above-average center. Varejao plays like a college kid — eventually he’ll develop a reputation as a modern-day Vlade Divac — but all that hustle work really pays off in the end: his rebounding is prolific and he gets a lot of scrub baskets as a result. Marshall comes and goes. When he rebounds he is quite effective. When he hovers around the three point line for long stretches he tends to play poorly. And LeBron James is pretty good, too. No revolving door there.

But then there is the Plague of the Guards. Eric Snow is one of the league leaders in assist-to-turnover ratio. That he doesn’t turn over the ball is by far the biggest contribution he makes to the team. That said, he’s not recording that many assists, he doesn’t score many points, nor does he generate many steals or rebounds. In other words, Eric Snow isn’t doing much to help the team win games, and it shows in his statistics. Damon Jones, as I wrote in my analysis of the point guards, works much better as a shooting guard in the rotation than he does as a point guard, but he isn’t getting that much time as a shooting guard because Snow has been playing so poorly. David Wesley is just not good. I have nothing else to say about him. At this point the smart move is to start giving Daniel Gibson more and more minutes as the PG. This early stretch of the schedule is the easiest the Cavs have all season. There is nothing in his history to suggest the Snow will suddenly improve come December or 2007. What we see right now may very well be about what we can expect from Snow for the rest of the season. And so why not give Gibson Snow’s minutes? With Hughes out Jones should slide over to the SG spot and Gibson should move in to replace Snow. That’s a fairly unintimidating back court with respect to defense, but it may very well be a formidable offensive front court (‘formidable’ relative to whatever else the Cavs can offer). As we saw yesterday the problem with the Cavs is not so much defense as it is offense. And the problem with the offense lies entirely with the guards. Until the Cavs can figure out some way to make the guards more productive, the Cavs won’t win many games.