Cavaliers Sleepwalk In Loss To Bulls

Cavs’ blog Fear The Sword fears the kind of effort they saw out of the Cavaliers tonight:

In a game that the Cavaliers seemed disinterested in playing for large parts of the final 3 quarters, a late LeBron James energy boost was not enough to beat a young Chicago Bulls team. First of, credit the Bulls. There were several times a young team could have folded – they didn’t. Instead it was the Cavs that played poor perimeter defense. It was the Cavs that turned the ball over at key times and it was the Cavs that couldn’t hit the big shot when needed.

Even the final play was flawed – especially in design. With 4.3 seconds remaining and the Cavaliers trailing by one, Mo Williams inbounded the ball to LeBron, with Shaq setting the pick to clear him. Nothing wrong there – except for the one guy I would imaging Shaq was supposed to get to – Joakim Noah – was the weakside help that caused LeBron to lose the ball out of bounds, ending any hopes the Cavs had of winning.

Many question whether or not LeBron should have been granted the foul on the final play. Fear The Sword thinks “the officials did a good job of swallowing their whistles for both sides late in the game and there was very little contact – just a lot of long arms.”