17 Takeaways from Cavs’ humiliating Game 4 loss to Pacers: It’s time to admit that Cavs are soft

INDIANAPOLIS — The Cleveland Cavaliers essentially had their season on the line tonight, but you wouldn’t have known it with the level of aggressiveness and physicality they played with.

It’s cliché and usually reductive to say that a team wanted it more. Maybe it is here as well. But it’s difficult to come away from this game with a major conclusion other than that.

The Indiana Pacers thoroughly embarrassed the Cavs 129-109. The final score makes the game look much closer than it actually was. The Pacers now have a commanding 3-1 lead in the series.

The Pacers set the tone early. Pascal Siakam knocked Max Strus down on back-to-back possessions early on. Bennedict Mathurin took a swipe at De’Andre Hunter shortly thereafter with a cheap shot to his ribs.

Hunter responded by delivering a two-handed shove to Mathurin.

This all resulted in an ejection for Mathurin and a technical for Hunter. At the moment, this seemed like a huge break for the Cavs.

Indiana lost their top scorer through the first three games of this series. But the Cavs completely lost their nerve. It was a trade the Pacers were more than happy to make.

Darius Garland didn’t have an answer for why the Cavs didn’t come out with a sense of urgency. He thought for 17 seconds before coming up with the best answer he could when asked about it postgame.

“It just didn’t happen tonight,” Garland eventually said.

Everything is clearer after the fact. We should’ve seen it as more of a red flag when Cavs head coach Kenny Atkinson went on a six-minute rant about the Pacers’ physicality before Game 3..

At the moment, it seemed like he was trying to protect his players from being injured. In reality, he was just trying to protect them from being exposed.

The Cavs are soft. That isn’t a label to throw lightly. But that’s just who this team is. It’s a disservice to everyone not to admit this after three years of playoff evidence to back this up.

Not even J.B. Bickerstaff — someone known for instilling toughness everywhere he goes — could help them be a more physical team. He tried his best in Cleveland. Bickerstaff attempted to talk it into existence, made a gimmick necklace to give away to the toughest guy in that game, and even played Lamar Stevens minutes he didn’t necessarily deserve just to give the team an edge.

None of it worked. Because when the rubber hit the road against the Knicks, they were completely punked and they knew it.

Last year, they were taken to seven games by an Orlando Magic team that was physically imposing but had very little skill. Mediocrity followed Orlando this season with mostly the same (albeit injured) roster.

But against the Cavs in the playoffs — when you can get away with more physicality and contact — mediocre is fine if you can play with an edge.

Indiana isn’t even an extraordinarily difficult matchup from that perspective.

Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle laughed when he was repeatedly asked about his “physical team.”

“This whole notion of us being this overly physical team is, I mean, I’m smiling about it a little bit,” Carlisle said before Game 2. “I mean, we’re not a big, bruising team.”

Carlisle knows his team better than anyone. And he isn’t wrong. They’re known for being this fast, high-paced team. They aren’t the Bad Boy Pistons. They aren’t the 2023 Knicks. They aren’t even close to that and don’t really want to be.

Indiana is just a team that knows how to throw the Cavs off their game, even though they don’t have imposing players.

And if a finesse Pacers team can do this against them, why can’t every opponent?

Jarrett Allen just can’t disappear like he did in Game 4. You can’t have a big, defense-first frontcourt that shrinks whenever there’s extra physicality. That’s what happens with Cleveland. And it’s specifically more noticeable with Allen because, unlike Mobley, he doesn’t have the overall skill to counterbalance some of those issues.

This was a complete no-show from Allen. He logged just two points and two rebounds in 20 minutes of play. It’s difficult for someone of his size not to run into a few more points or rebounds when playing that long.

Meanwhile, his counterpart, Myles Turner, completely wrecked the game.

Turner was everything Allen wasn’t. He was stretching the floor, he was getting rebounds, he was playmaking, and he was controlling the paint. Turner didn’t shrink from the moment, he embraced it.

And we aren’t talking about Mitchell Robinson or a Steven Adams-like center. The Cavs’ bigs were getting punked by Myles Turner.

That simply can’t happen to the degree that it did with the season supposedly on the line.

Where do you go from here? That’s a question we will be discussing throughout the offseason. But there needs to be some kind of mentality change to prevent this from happening after it’s occurred three seasons in a row now.

Groups can grow, and maybe this one can, but it’s fair to wonder if this core four is the right mix to allow the Cavs to push past these issues.

We know they’re good. But good doesn’t cut it if you’re consistently shrinking in the moment like this.

The best way to prevent threes is to keep the other team from shooting them. The Pacers aren’t doing that. Cleveland shot 43% of their shots from beyond the arc (72nd percentile). If anything, they’re daring the Cavs to take those shots.

The issue is, the best three-point shooting team in the league all season is refusing to hit them. They turned things around late when the outcome was already decided, but they shot 5-19 (26.3%) from distance in the first half. And that was after coming into this one having shot under 30% in the previous three games in the series. For context, they didn’t have back-to-back games in the regular season shooting under that threshold.

The best teams are typically the ones that make their threes. But when that goes away at the wrong time, the best teams can look like the worst and vice versa.

The Pacers are showing us the inverse of this phenomenon. They once again couldn’t miss. Indiana hit six of their first nine threes to set the tempo. It took Cleveland 21 attempts to hit their sixth triple.

Indiana went 12-18 (66.7%) from three in the first half. Even though they got good looks, that’s still a ridiculously high number.

They’re now shooting 41.9% from three in the series and 45.5% in the three games they’ve won.

If this is who the Pacers were all season, they wouldn’t have been a 50-32 team. They would’ve been a 60+ win team.

The Cavs lost the possession battle in a way they haven’t previously. They didn’t get second-chance points and they turned it over 14 times, leading to 23 points off turnovers for Indiana.

Winning the possession game and Donovan Mitchell’s heroics are the only reasons why games have been as close as they’ve been throughout this series. When that went away, everything went up in smoke.

Indiana obliterated Cleveland’s 3-2 zone. Carlisle made some adjustments. The main one was forcing Mobley into screens up top. That opened up everything as the Pacers were able to get whatever they wanted from there, both inside and outside.

And, to make matters worse, Atkinson stuck with the zone for far too long, even though it was clear it wasn’t working.

Cleveland’s depth has been missing in action. We know that Ty Jerome has been bad. He looks like the complete opposite player he was in the regular season. But he’s hardly the only one.

The entire bench — which was one of their biggest strengths all season — has completely vanished.

The Cavs’ role players were phenomenal in the regular season. Atinson empowered them, they’ve fit into roles, and they’ve shown that they can complement each other’s skill sets perfectly. But does that matter if they look like the 2023 reserves in playoff games against somewhat equal competition?

Atkinson doesn’t have an easy solution to this. His starters are all banged up, and they can’t be effective with larger minute loads against this high-paced team.

The Cavaliers’ strengths are all drying up in the moments they needed to show through the most.

A comeback is only possible with a healthy Donovan Mitchell. He’s been the best player all series, but didn’t have it tonight. Mitchell injured himself after landing awkwardly while warming up for the second half. The team called it an ankle injury. Mitchell said that he’s going to play on Tuesday.

He’ll need to if they want to mount any type of comeback.

Darius Garland showed some good things in garbage time. He found a rhythm in the third quarter. The game was already decided by that point, but 12 points on 4-6 shooting with five helpers in that frame is meaningful for someone who’s been out as long as he has.

“It’s my second game back, especially in this series [it’s important],” Garland said about finding a rhythm in the third quarter. “Seeing what they’re doing on the offensive end and actually being out there and participating instead of watching from the sideline [was helpful].”

Garland mentioned that he’s still “battling through some stuff,” but he did look much more comfortable out there than he did in Game 3. They will need this version of Garland going forward if they want to climb out of their 3-1 deficit.

Only the Cavs can change the narrative. People will call the Cavs soft (as I just did), ask for them to shake up the core (which, I basically did but stopped short of going all the way), and will call them the 2015 Atlanta Hawks (I wouldn’t go that far, but I get it). That’s part of the territory that comes with being a good regular-season team but repeatedly fumbling playoff games.

They can still change that, or at least try to, by showing some fight in Game 5 back in Cleveland. We’ll figure out soon enough whether this group can respond to adversity like they claim they can.