The Cleveland Cavaliers are facing a situation no team wants to face in the playoffs and that’s a 3-1 deficit. With their Game 4 loss against the New York Knicks, they now find themselves heading home facing elimination. This series has been drastically different from most of the other playoff series’ across the NBA as there has not been any major high scoring games. The Knicks for one, have been playing a dying breed of defense as they’ve held the Cavs to under 100 points in the last two games. The Cavs defense hasn’t been too bad either as the Knicks haven’t had any monstrous offensive outbursts. But apparently the defense isn’t completely to the liking of Jarrett Allen as per Chris Fedor of Cleveland.com.
The Cavs have allowed the Knicks to score 101, 90, 99 and 102 points respectively. On a regular night, that’s usually good enough to win. One of the main issues with the Cavs is they haven’t been able to generate consistent offense in this series. This was a team that averaged around 112 points per game during the regular season and they’ve only been able reach the century mark once (107 in Game 2) in this series so far.
Jarrett Allen has been one of the consistent lynchpins of the Cavs defense this season. He averaged 1.2 blocked shots during the regular season and through the first three games of this series he’s averaged 1.7. He didn’t record a blocked shot in Game 4 and he finished with only three defensive rebounds, four in total. Allen and the Cavs will need a strong defensive effort in Game 5 if they don’t want to see their season end early.