Remember when the Cavs were cruising and coach Tyronn Lue was being heralded as the man with the plan who made it all click in Cleveland?
Well, those good times are gone — the Raptors have objectively outplayed the Cavaliers over the past two games to tie the Eastern Conference Finals at 2-2, and the honeymoon period for Cleveland's new coach is now over.
It might be hard to believe, but we have a series, and the Cavs are on their back heels, needing to make some critical adjustments ahead of a pivotal Game 5 on Wednesday in Cleveland.
We're about to find out if Lue has what it takes to be a championship coach.
When the Cavaliers jumped out to an impressive and frequently dominating 10-0 start to the playoffs, Lue received plenty of credit for the Cavs' success, and the praise was fair.
Gone was the one- or no-pass offense that the Cavaliers ran in the regular season — the alternating isolation sets of LeBron James and the offensively brilliant Kyrie Irving had evaporated. No, the Cavs found their pace-and-space, ball-moving best in the playoffs. Lue was calling all the right plays, his rotations were on point — he always seemed to have Kevin Love or Channing Frye playing center at just the right time to make a game-changing run — and he had the Cavs playing team defense as well as they had all season.
The games weren't always blowouts — weeks later, it only seemed that way — but the Cavs had the magic touch through the first month of the postseason.
Having LeBron makes it easy, no doubt. Putting Irving, Love, Tristan Thompson, and deadeye shooters J.R. Smith and Frye around the four-time MVP hardly hurts either.
But the Cavs were playing beautiful basketball under Lue, and they looked every bit a team that could win the title after going up 2-0 against the Raptors. Who could have thought anything else? The Cavs looked like they had broken Toronto's spirit in the first two games.
But Toronto improbably punched back, Kyle Lowry pulled himself out of a two-month slump, and the Eastern Conference Finals are now a three-game showdown.
Concurrently, the Cavs have fallen back into old, regrettable offensive habits when Irving and James play together. The stale, predictable and ineffective alternating isolations are back, only to be broken up by a few feedings of Love on the block — in quarters one through three only, of course.
The desertion of the ball movement that had the Cavs' confidence buzzing in the first two rounds of the playoffs and first two games of the Eastern Conference Finals is highly concerning. Equally concerning is the lack of impact from Love — the third member of Cleveland's Big Three.
Love didn't play in the fourth quarter in Games 3 or 4, despite the Cavs being in both contests late. Apparently, it would have been unfair to put him in late in Game 4, according to Lue.
It's hard to imagine Love would have made a difference at the end of Game 4 — his offensive game has produced more embarrassments than highlights, and his defense, at times heralded for its effort during these playoffs, has, on the whole, been a major liability for the Cavs.
Lue's favorite role for Love in the first two rounds of the playoffs had been as a stretch-five, but Frye has worthily overtaken the former UCLA star as the top small-ball center. Heading into Game 5, it seems that Love is more trouble than he's worth, and that's never a good thing to determine about a star player this deep into the playoffs.
The vexing formula that brought about this tied series won't be fixed by magic. James, even with all his talent and will, can't make the problem go away. These issues — a team defense that has a 117 rating in the past two games, an offensive devolution, and the overall ineffectiveness of a star — need to be solved by shrewd and deft coaching over the next 36 hours.
Is Lue the kind of coach who can make the adjustments necessary to get the Cavs back on course to win Cleveland's first major professional sports title since 1964? We're about to find out.
