Cleveland Cavaliers: No time to panic despite it being hot take season

The Cleveland Cavaliers haven’t been playing well of late and panicking isn’t going to help.

Well, my friends, it’s the middle of January and you know what that means…we get to hear these hot takes from our favorite pundits – “The Cleveland Cavaliers are in free-fall”. “Father time is catching up to LeBron”. “Cleveland has a non-existent defense.” LeBron James ran Kyrie Irving out of town”. Yada. Yada. Yada.

I’ve heard the same thing repeatedly for the last three years since James returned to Cleveland. Everyone else can panic but I’m going to take a page out of the Philadelphia 76ers ‘playbook and “Trust the Process”.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. According basketball-reference.com, Cleveland started the 2014-15 campaign under .500 in mid-January with a 19-20 overall record. They also had a 5-6 record over a stretch in November and December during their 2015-16 championship season.

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Last season the Cavs went 4-7 over a period in January from 1/4-1/25.

What do these three different seasons all have in common?

Newly acquired players were getting acclimated to the rotation.
Long road swings that typically involved traveling to the west coast.
All of them went to the NBA finals.

There are some logical excuses for their latest downward trajectory of play. Dating back to December 17, 10 of the last 12 games for Cleveland have been on the road. That’s including Christmas in Oakland, CA, multiple back-to-backs, and a stretch of five straight road games.

During all this chaos, Isaiah Thomas returned to the lineup on January 2, throwing the Cavaliers’ rotation even more out of whack. With that said, I don’t care what you say, trying to play quality defense in 10 different cities over 26 days is not the easiest thing to do.

That’s especially the case for a veteran team trying to re-integrate an all-star point guard back into the lineup.

Just because I’m not worried about the Cavaliers’ January free-fall doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that they have serious defensive issues that have hindered them all season. They normally can get away with simply outscoring the other team and not trying on defense. However, that hasn’t worked this year.

You cannot have the 29th ranked defense and expect to achieve the goal of winning an NBA title. What we all need to understand is that this trend will change as the roster begins to build more chemistry.