Cavaliers put focus on happy endings
CLEVELAND — Back from Boston, Kevin Love spent part of his day off talking to kids about fitness.
The topic was appropriate. The Cavaliers look in much better shape.
With four consecutive wins, including a 114-91 walkover against the Celtics to wrestle back control atop the Eastern Conference, the Cavaliers might be gelling just in time for the NBA playoffs and a run at a second title in a row.
Less than a week after Cleveland lost three consecutive games and five of seven, and just days following a heated exchange between LeBron James and Tristan Thompson that seemed to tear at the team’s fabric and prompted questions about the champions’ chemistry, all seems to be right with the closest thing the league has to a day-and-night time soap opera.
“We thrive under chaos,” Love said Thursday.
True, there’s rarely a dull moment in Cleveland, where every game seems to take the importance of a season, and where the team is dissected daily as if it were in a high school science lab.
Now in his third season, Love has gotten used to the spotlight that comes with playing alongside James, but the All-Star forward acknowledged there have been long stretches this season when the Cavaliers haven’t been as focused as needed. He says the criticism has merit. They’ve been coasting, guilty of taking teams lightly and taking games off.
“It seems like there are times during the season — and it could be true — where we just say, ‘the regular season is no big deal,‘” Love said, relaxing in a quiet room before he spoke with hundreds of school kids at an area Boys & Girls Club. “But l think last night and in the third quarter [Tuesday] against Orlando, our pace of play and defensively, how we were moving and how we were communicating was so much better.”
The Cavaliers showed no mercy against the Celtics, demolishing the East’s No. 2 team on its famed parquet floor from opening tip to final horn. It easily was one of Cleveland’s most complete games this season, and, while James insisted it wasn’t meant to send an external message, Love felt the victory resonated inside Cleveland’s locker room.
“We weren’t overly invested in that game last night thinking we had to win, that this is the biggest game,” he said. “But we looked at it as a great challenge for us and it was an opportunity for us to go in there against a team that’s tied with us for first place, and playing on a back-toback, which we haven’t had a good record in all year and we wanted to play good basketball and we did that.”