How each Eastern Conference contender can beat the Cleveland Cavaliers
By Jared Dubin
At the start of this season, it was essentially a foregone conclusion that the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers would meet in the NBA Finals for a third straight season. Despite the fact that we’ve never seen a Finals trilogy before, the strength of each conference favorite was such that it seemed overwhelmingly likely we’d get the same matchup again.
The Warriors have held up their end of the bargain. They’re a heavy favorite to return to the Finals out of the West, with Basketball-Reference giving them a 67.3 percent chance of winning the Western Conference and FiveThirtyEight estimating their chances at 66 percent. It would be a major upset if they got knocked off before getting a chance to vie for the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Things have gotten a bit more complicated in the East, as injuries and poor defense combined to knock Cleveland off its perch as the No. 1 seed in the conference and three other contenders (of varying degrees) have emerged. Ahead of the first round of the playoffs, neither Basketball-Reference nor FiveThirtyEight gives the Cavs the best chance of any East team at making the Finals. In fact, Basketball-Reference has them third at 22.7 percent and FiveThirtyEight has them fourth at 11 percent.
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The Cavs are still the defending champs, though, and they still have LeBron James. That’s why the betting public still considers a return trip and a rubber match the most likely scenario. Cleveland has the best title odds of any team in the East by far — the Westgate Superbook has the Cavaliers at 7-2 to win the championship, with the Celtics as the next-closest Eastern Conference team at 20-1, per ESPN.
Given the market reality, it’s entirely appropriate to view the East through the same prism as we viewed the West last week: if we accept that each of the other contenders’ chances of actually defeating Cleveland is already relatively small, the more interesting question becomes not the percentage chance that any of them can do it, but if they are to do it, how will it be done?
Boston Celtics: Issue spotting
Cleveland is used to going on the road and winning in the playoffs, but having home court in any potential series against the Cavaliers certainly gives Boston an advantage that Toronto and Washington don’t have.
Beyond that, any Celtics win over the Cavs absolutely has to start with Boston solving its biggest bug-a-boo: defensive rebounding. Al Horford’s Hawks were knocked out by the Cavs in each of the last two playoffs, and the rebounding numbers for those series got ugly.
"During the 2015 Eastern Conference Finals, the Cavs hammered Atlanta on the offensive glass, corralling the board on nearly 30 percent of their misses. Tristan Thompson alone snared 17 offensive boards in four games. During the second round of the 2016 playoffs, Cleveland did it again, devouring offensive rebounds at a 31 percent clip. This time, Thompson gobbled up 24 of his teammates’ misses in four games, while Kevin Love added 15 of his own.Horford wasn’t the sole contributor to Atlanta’s rebounding woes, but he did play a starring role. He totaled just 28 defensive rebounds across those two four-game sweeps, and the Hawks’ team defensive rebounding percentage was significantly worse with him on the floor during both series (around six percent in 2015 and eight percent in 2016)."
Horford has to factor heavily into the offense in order for the Celtics to score enough to beat Cleveland, so he has to be on the floor. That means finding some other way to make sure they don’t get hammered on the glass, whether it’s all five guys crashing rather than anyone leaking out, switching up matchups, or something else. It has to happen or they won’t stand a chance.
Rebounding isn’t the only playoff issue the Celtics will have to solve to topple the Cavs, though.
Isaiah Thomas is 65 of 173 from the field (37.6 percent) and 16 of 64 on 3-pointers (25.0 percent) in two trips to the postseason. Given his importance to their offense (he carried a 34 percent usage rate this season), that’s simply untenable. The 2016-17 version of Isaiah is a different beast than the one we saw the last two years, though, and particularly against Cleveland. He’d struggled badly against them during the previous two seasons, but lit them up for 30, 31, 30, and 26 on 35 of 71 (49.3 percent) shooting across four matchups this season. More of that is good. More of what we saw during the last four seasons is asking for a loss.
Toronto Raptors: Flexibility (with a dash of DeMar)
The biggest thing the Raptors have going for them this year is that they can seamlessly swing between playing big and playing small without losing anything on either end. Masai Ujiri’s midseason deals for Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker ensured that would be the case, and that’s largely why many people felt the Raps had the best trade deadline of any team in the league. (Side note: Can we talk for a quick second about Ujiri getting Ibaka and Tucker AND dumping Jared Sullinger, all for the price of Terrence Ross, a pick in the mid-to-late 20’s, and two seconds? That man is a wizard. There’s no other explanation for how he just keeps winning trades.)
Ibaka starts next to Jonas Valanciunas at the power forward spot, but if the Raptors come up against a small lineup where Jonas can’t hang defensively (like, say, any of the Kevin Love at center lineups that smoked them during last year’s conference finals), they can easily pivot to using Serge at the 5, with some combination of Tucker, DeMarre Carroll, Patrick Patterson, and Cory Joseph next to Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan on the outside. There’s no lineup the Cavs can play that puts the Raptors into a no-win situation, and that’s a big change from last season.
They also have several defenders they can potentially throw at LeBron now, which is huge because Carroll, while game, has not exactly had great success trying to stop the King. Tucker is one of the handful of most annoying (in a good way) wing defenders in basketball, and he will do his damnedest to bother LeBron during the minutes they share the floor. That’s sure to be pesky.
On the other end of the floor, DeRozan has to be able to find similar success as he did during the regular season. Toronto isn’t likely to beat Cleveland without its backcourt stepping up in a big way, and with Lowry still working his way back from his wrist injury, DeRozan seems more likely to handle the lion’s share of possessions. If he can give J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert the business, that will go a long way toward getting the Raptors where they need to go.
Washington Wizards: Offensive explosion
The Cavs and Wizards played two absolute barnburners in 2017, after the Wizards turned their season around in mid-December. The final scores of those games: 140-135 Cavaliers, and 127-115 Washington. If the Wizards are going to come away with this series, it’ll likely have been a matchup where the scores stuck in that range.
The Cavs have gotten all the attention for their porous defense, but the Wizards’ defense after the All-Star break was nearly as disastrous — it was a mere 0.4 points per 100 possessions better, per NBA.com. The Wiz, though, can still fill up the basket, and they’ll need to do exactly that to beat the Cavs.
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John Wall will have to be at his best, zooming up and down the floor and firing bullets to Bradley Beal and Otto Porter and Bojan Bogdanovic and Kelly Oubre and Markieff Morris. He’ll have to fry Kyrie Irving (or Shumpert) in the half-court as well. Beal will have to be at his sniping best. Porter will need to be always on the move, finding the creases in the defense with well-timed cuts and sliding his way into the proper passing lanes. Oubre will need to bring it defensively and on the break. Bojan will need to go bonkers. Morris will need to tap into the two-way versatility the Wizards paid a lottery pick price for. Marcin Gortat will have to set the best screens of his life before crashing the boards like a man man. Jason Smith will have to continue his unlikely renaissance.