If you were to draw up the worst-case scenario for the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 3 — that didn’t involve injuries — it’d look pretty similar to what we saw. The Cavs couldn’t keep control of the ball, had awful games from their star backcourt, missed clean looks, and weren’t putting up good contests on three-point shots.
This all came to a head in the fourth quarter when the Toronto Raptors ran them off the floor. They outscored Cleveland 43-23 in the final frame to cruise to a lopsided 126-104 victory to trim their deficit in the series to 2-1.
Cavs head coach Kenny Atkinson has consistently talked about wanting to win the possession battle. To do that, you need to take care of the basketball. The Cavs simply didn’t do that.
Cleveland turned it over 20 times, which accounted for 22.9% of their possessions (2nd percentile). This led to 23 points for Toronto.
James Harden was the worst offender. He coughed it up eight times, which included six in the second half when the game was getting away.
The Cavs have gone as Harden has offensively. He’s been at the center of their resurgence on that end to close the season. And when things go wrong — as they did on Thursday — he deserves the blame.
The Raptors made cutting off lanes to the basket a priority — especially when Harden drove. They completely sucked into the paint to close avenues for Harden to score or pass inside. Given how switchable and how much length Toronto has at the wing, this led to turnovers.
Just look at how crowded the lane is on some of these drives.
Atkinson mentioned that the spacing wasn’t great, which led to some of the miscues. Part of that is due to the clunkiness of playing two non-shooting bigs. Part of that is due to not having a good offensive process.
A situation like the one below, where everyone is below the free-throw line, and four are either in the paint or one step removed, is only going to end one way.
Collapsing this hard made it difficult for the guards to score inside.
None of Harden’s 13 shots came in the restricted area, while only three were in the paint. Meanwhile, Donovan Mitchell took just three of his 16 shots at the rim and only seven in the paint in total. That all led to no free-throw attempts for Mitchell and six for Harden.
It’s difficult to keep Cleveland’s guards from getting to the basket, even when you’re making a concerted effort to do so. The Raptors deserve a ton of credit for this. All five defenders were competing hard, communicating, and executing the game plan at a high level. This included Scottie Barnes, who was hands down the best player on both sides of the ball.
Additionally, the Raptors did a good job of making Harden and Mitchell work when they didn’t have the ball. They weren’t allowing easy catches above the arc, and denied them the ball whenever they could.
At the same time, playing this way is incredibly risky. Toronto’s entire game plan was predicated on the hope that the Cavs, particularly their guards, would miss wide-open threes, and that’s exactly what they did.
Mitchell went 1-7 for deep. Many of those were clean looks that he got through pull-ups or from spotting up.
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Harden went 3-10, and it was much the same story. Toronto went under on screens to cut off the drives to the hoop that were so effective in the first two games of the series.
Collapsing the paint this aggressively lends itself to open catch-and-shoot threes as well. Some made the most of those opportunities, like Max Strus (4-8) and Jaylon Tyson (3-6). Others couldn’t, such as Dean Wade (1-4) and Evan Mobley (0-4).
As a team, the Cavs went 14-45 from three (31.1%). Those looks accounted for 50% of their shots (94th percentile).