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November 15, 2012With his Cleveland Cavaliers team struggling mightily on the defensive end and the large part of the abuse coming at the expense of his reserve unit, head coach Byron Scott still plans on sticking to his deep rotation, preferring his players focus on their individual efforts.
At Thursday afternoon’s practice, Scott admitted that while he has considered shortening his rotation, which has typically seen at least 10 men play crucial minutes in any given contest, going to an eight-man rotation would be a “last resort.” Stating that he still has a few “buttons to push,” it appears that Scott would prefer his team play up to their potential on the defensive end, including but not limited to communication and on-ball defense. He has not ruled out more moves involving the Cavaliers’ starting lineup, allowing for higher quality players coming off of the bench.
During the Cavaliers’ six-game road trip, the starting unit shot 48 percent from the floor and had a point differential of +63; reserves shot 34 percent from the floor and had a collective point differential of -228.1
Following their most recent loss, Scott stated that only Anderson Varejao, Daniel Gibson and Alonzo Gee showed the passion and competitiveness needed on the defensive end. Despite recently concluding a six-game road trip, Scott had select players in on Wednesday for a closed door practice with the full team joining for a full practice focused on defensive and conditioning.
[Related: Byron Scott questions Cavs’ passion and competitiveness in latest loss]
- Hat tip to the great Cavs Witness [↩]
9 Comments
Hopefully it will translate into better gameday defense. Off the ball D against Brooklyn atrotious. Getting beat on backdoors consistantly and if the bigs doubled there was no rotation at all which lead to easy dunks all night.
There defense is making them unwatchable, and don’t even get me started on the bench…
This team is hardly unwatchable. Even though there bench is awful, it is still fun to watch Kyrie Dion and Andy on a nightly basis. I’d rather watch them than the LeBron Cavs under Mike Brown. Even though we were good, we were really hard to watch on offense.
That’s nonsense. At what point entering the season did anybody say “man their defense will be great.” Its lousy as expected. That doesn’t mean we’re not fun as heck to watch. The Phoenix Suns years ago in the Nash/Stoudemire high times had horrid defense yet were one of the funnest teams to watch.
So being blown out is fun?
it’s like people only remember the playoffs and completely forget the gooseneck goodtimes of the regular season
I like watching these guys but I’m not going to say I would rather watch them over LeBron. Even though I hate what he did, when he was here I was all in. I even bought Witness t-shirts for the whole family. It was a great time to be a Cavs fan for sure. Lets hope Kyrie and Dion can bring that magic back!
Lets not forget that thoses teams did nothing, they won nothing.
a break here, a play there. you make it sound as if they weren’t a serious contender. i wish that season JoeJ broke his face played out differently, but you have to roll with the (sometimes literal) punches.