The Cleveland Cavaliers suffered a truly embarrassing loss on Monday. Playing at home against the defending champion Golden State Warriors, the Cavs looked mostly apathetic as they lost 132-98. It was a troubling sight for a team that expects to win a championship this season. That they could not muster the energy and effort to at least compete with the Warriors as well as simply being out-played by them showed that the team has a long way to go to win a title, despite their almost certain path to the Finals.
LeBron James seems to think the same way. The Cavaliers’ forward spoke to reporters after the game and remained calm about the loss, calling it “a basketball game.” While he is correct to not put too much into a regular season game, James did speak about what it says about the state of the team at this point in the season (via Jeff Zillgitt of USA Today Sports):
“Against the top teams you want to play well, and we haven’t done that,” James said. “We’re 0-3 versus the top two teams in the West. We’re 0-1 against the Bulls so far. We’ve got to play better basketball.
“We’ve got a long way to go. Tonight was an example of how far we’ve got to go to get to a championship level, and we’ve just got to continue to get better.”
LeBron brings up a good point about the Cavs’ play against elite teams in the NBA. Four games are not enough to judge a team, but common sense would say that a title contender is able to get a win or two against other top teams. The Cavs need some sort of jolt of energy, and perhaps they are waiting for a late-stretch run to carry them into the playoffs with momentum. However, it appears more and more likely that they might not give much of a fight to the Warriors or Spurs in the Finals.
Whether the Cavaliers attempt to shake up the team with a trade or they just hang tight and hope to improve as a team is unknown, but the team needs to start improving to have any hope of winning the first championship in franchise history.
