Isaiah Thomas has been the most vocal critic of his team during the Cleveland Cavaliers’ skid. After Tuesday’s game in which the Cavs gave up a 21-point lead to the last-place Orlando Magic, Thomas implied in a comment that the coaching staff weren’t making any in-game adjustments.
Coach Tyronn Lue simply responded with “That’s not true.”
It’s hard to deny that the Cavaliers have not been adjusting well during games whenever teams recognize how to attack their defense or how to play them on offense. But it’s also true that the effort being shown by the players is less than satisfactory.
In that infamous game against the Magic, the Cavs not only gave up a 21-point lead, they also lost by 18 points to a team that was undermanned and missing its best player in Aaron Gordon.
The loss was so frustrating that it led to Thomas’ criticism of the coaching, as per Dave McMenamin of ESPN.
“We got to do better,” Thomas said. “We got to adjust throughout the game. They made adjustments, and it worked, and we just kept getting hit with the same thing, and we made no adjustments. And that’s been one of our biggest problems all year, is adjusting. Teams are not just going to allow us to continue to score and continue to do things at a high level. They’re going to make adjustments, and we have to do the same thing, too, and we’re not that good at that right now.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t that Lue and the coaching staff aren’t making adjustments. It may be that any adjustments they make aren’t working, hence Thomas’ critical comments about the Cavs not making any.
Either way, the Cavs need to figure out their problems fast because they might not even make it to one of the higher seeds in the playoffs when all is said and done.