Cavs hit halfway point on 10-game skid

The Cavaliers reached the halfway point of their 2018-19 season on Jan. 8 with a 123-115 loss to the Pacers.

The crowd inside Quicken Loans Arena was small and apathetic until a Cavaliers’ rally in the fourth quarter stirred excitement.

The Cavaliers outscored the Pacers in the second, third and fourth quarters after being outscored, 3816, in the first 12 minutes, so they can find something positive in that. But not playing well for four quarters had been a bugaboo for the Cavs all season.

“We can look at this game and take some things from it and we can build from it,” Coach Larry Drew said. “But we have to make sure moving forward we don’t put ourselves in those positions. We’ve shown we can be better than our record indicates. But that takes us being more consistent in all four quarters.”

Depending, perhaps, on how you view life in general, your reaction to reaching the midpoint of the season is, “Good, that means this nightmare is halfway over,” or “Oh, no! That means they still have to play 41 games.”

The Cavaliers have lost 10 straight, and with road games in New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles against the Lakers, Portland, Utah and Denver to play before facing the Bulls at home Jan. 21, a quick end to the misery seems unlikely.

This is not a knock on current coach Larry Drew. But each loss is a reminder General Manager Koby Altman made Tyronn Lue a scapegoat by firing Lue for starting 0-6. The Cavaliers were still adjusting to life without LeBron James, who left in free agency to play with the Lakers.

Not only that. The best player on the roster with James gone was Kevin Love, and Love played the first four games with an injured toe and hasn’t played since.

Altman either seriously misjudged the team he put together, or he has a great poker face, because a day after firing Lue, without a twitch on Oct. 29 he said: “This is a different group and we feel it needs a different voice. I didn’t want to string it out any longer. I didn’t think that’d be fair to Ty, I didn’t think it’d be fair to this group. We wanted to overachieve. That hasn’t happened.”

The Cavaliers haven’t overachieved under Drew either. It wasn’t Lue’s fault and it isn’t Drew’s fault.

“Things have gone kind of how I anticipated from a rebuild standpoint,” Drew said in his pregame news conference Jan. 8. “Young guys getting minutes — some games playing through their mistakes, some games not. Different lineup changes, which is something I didn’t anticipate as much, particularly with Kevin being out.

“For me and my staff, it hasn’t been an easy task as far as juggling lineups and moving people around in different spots. That’s just the way things have gone.”

The Cavaliers’ unspoken goal now is to get the first pick in the draft. Their best chance of earning that booby prize would be to finish with one of the worst three records in the NBA.

The Cavs’ record of 8-33 is rock bottom, but it is such a rich man-poor man league that they are not the worst team by much. The Phoenix Suns are right behind them (ahead of them, really) at 9-32. The Hawks have won 12 games. The Bulls and Knicks have won 10 each.

The Cavaliers have used 17 starting lineups already this season. Most of the juggling has been caused by injuries. Guard Matthew Dellavedova (two games missed) and center Ante Zizic (five games missed) returned for the game with the Pacers. But forward Larry Nance limped off the floor with a right knee injury in the first half and did not return. He could miss at least part of the trip that begins Jan. 9 in New Orleans.

Rodney Hood, day-today with right Achilles soreness, has missed five of the last seven games. Guard David Nwaba has been out since Dec. 23 with a knee injury.

Most years starting in 1999, by the time the Browns reached the halfway mark of the season, fans turned their attention to the draft. Now, after four straight trips to the NBA Finals, Cavaliers fans are doing the same thing at the halfway point of this season.

Schudel can be reached at JSchudel@News-Herald. com; @jsproinsider on Twitter.