Written by Carter Rodriguez at Fear The Sword.com
The Cavaliers have LeBron James. The Indiana Pacers didn’t.
Things didn’t go as swimmingly in the Cavaliers first round sweep against Indiana as people might have hoped. Cleveland gave up a great look to C.J. Miles for a chance to steal Game 1, blew an big lead in Game 2, fell behind by 25 points at half in Game 3, and a calamitous turnover from J.R. Smith nearly sent Game 4 to overtime.
This wasn’t your typical sweep, and the numbers back that up.
Cavaliers outscored the Pacers by just 16 points in the series. There has never been a smaller margin in a four-game sweep.
— Dan Feldman (@DanFeldmanNBA) April 23, 2017
Why did it play out this way? Well, there were quite a few mitigating factors.
First, the Pacers played really, really well. Paul George played like a top-five player in this series, and the Cavaliers declined to put their best defensive weapon, LeBron James on him.
George averaged 28.0 points, 8.8 rebounds and 7.3 assists for the series, with his assists serving as a function of the Cavaliers willingness to trap him off the pindown screens that were brutalizing the Cavaliers early in the series. George launched 10 threes a game in this series and hit 43 percent of them. That’s absolutely nuts – suspect Cavaliers defense or not.
Meanwhile, for the Cavaliers, Kyrie Irving’s jumper completely abandoned him after one of his best years shooting behind the arc. Irving launched 8.0 threes per game, which is a healthy number for a player with the pull-up prowess that he possesses. Unfortunately, he only made 1.8 of those attempts in these four games, good for 21.9 percent.
Irving’s shooting wasn’t the only woe for the Cavaliers. The team shot a brutal 72 percent from the line in the series, and left plenty of room for improvement at the charity stripe and allowed Indiana to stay in games that should have been out of range.
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