The Cleveland Cavaliers are a defensive horror show. This isn’t some revelatory statement, but it needs to be said.
You, like many others, might brush off Cleveland’s struggles as an older team with some understandable early season rust. You might think that since we’ve been down the road of panicking over Cleveland’s defensive inefficiencies before, it’s much too early to worry about them now, but this time it’s time to be concerned.
If you are one of those hypothetical people, you will very likely point to last season as Exhibit A. Last March, we worked ourselves into a frenzy over whether Cleveland’s defense finally meant the end of LeBron’s Eastern Conference supremacy, but the Cavs responded to this worry by steamrolling over the rest of the conference.