Jim Ingraham: Cavs don't show up, aren't physical enough

It is arguably the worst showing by a Cleveland team in a big game maybe ever. The final score was 129-109, and it wasn't nearly that close. Halfway through the third quarter the Cavs were losing 92-58. With a chance to follow up their electrifying win over the Indiana Pacers in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference series, the inexplicably docile Cavs got punked, chumped and dunked in an utterly embarrassing loss to the Pacers on Sunday in Game 4. The Cavaliers trail the best-of-seven series 3-1. This wasn't a basketball game, this was a full-blown mugging. The Cavs didn't look ready to play, and it showed from the opening tip. The wildly physical Pacers did whatever they wanted to, and the bewitched, bothered and bewildered Cavs had no answer for any of it. "Who are these guys?" coach Kenny Atkinson, and Cavs fans everywhere, must have asked themselves. The game was over halfway through the first quarter. The Pacers physically overpowered the Cavs from start to finish. The Cavs, bizarrely enough, played as though the Pacers would automatically roll over for them. Instead, the Pacers humiliated them. At times the Pacers were laughing at the stumbling, bumbling Cavs, who in the first half had more turnovers (14) than field goals (eight). The Cavs were never in the game, which, in point of fact, was over almost before it started. At halftime the Cavs went to the locker room trailing 80-39, tying the largest halftime deficit in NBA postseason history. The Pacers went over 100 points before the end of the third quarter. At no time did the Cavs play like the team that spent most of the regular season reeling off double-digit winning streak after double-digit winning streak. Those streaks seem like ancient history. Those streaks were created by this team, which in no way resembles the team that beat most of the teams it played for most of the season. What's going on with the Cavs is a mystery. They seemed to have stopped the bleeding with the win over Indiana on Friday. But none of that matters now. What matters is how do the Cavs recover from getting humiliated Sunday night. Losing in itself was bad enough. But losing by getting the doors blown off what was the best team in the Eastern Conference this year doesn't compute. Not once this year did the Cavs look this overmatched, this intimidated, this out of sync. Worse yet, it wasn't just one player, it was all of them. The Pacers seemed to sense that, and they fed off it. The series shifts to Cleveland, where the Pacers will try to put the Cavs out of their misery. It's a Cavs team that for most of the season looked like the best team in the Eastern Conference, if not the best team in the NBA. But in their three losses to the Pacers the Cavs have looked totally unnerved, totally intimidated and totally clueless on what to do to get this team's engine started again. Indiana is clearly in the driver's seat, and the Cavs clearly have some issues within the team that are preventing them from putting together a last-ditch salvage job. Nobody saw this coming, especially, one would imagine, Kenny Atkinson. What looked as close to a flawless team for most of this season now looks like a ship lost at sea. There is no cohesiveness, no playing like a potential champion. Indeed, it's like the Pacers have intimidated the Cavs to the point that Cleveland is out of answers. What has been most obvious in this series is that the Cavs were not prepared for the physicality that the Pacers have thrown at them. Matching their opponents' physicality has been a problem for the Cavs for most of this season. They are excellent when it comes to nuance, but not so much when it comes time to get physical. Playing a team like Indiana only accentuates the Cavs' deficiency in this area. In this series in particular, the Pacers are by far the more physical, and the Cavs seem reluctant to respond. It's probably too late to do anything about it, but if the Cavs are about to circle the drain, compliments of the Pacers, there will be no mystery to what caused the collapse. The lack of physicality, that's what. The Cavs are one loss away from golf season, and one loss away from going on a search party for a trait they have lacked all season: some muscle, some bulk, some don't-back-down. Until they find that, and deploy it effectively, their ceiling may be a conference championship, at best. When it comes to playoff basketball, beating the teams with the muscle is job one. The clock is ticking on a Cavs season that is dangerously close to an unfulfilled ending, which would be a shame. Contact Jim Ingraham at jingraham4@gmail.com and follow him @jim_ingraham on X.