CLEVELAND, Ohio — In this episode of the Wine and Gold Talk podcast, Ethan Sands and Chris Fedor dive into the Cavs’ early-season struggles.
Takeaways:
Q: Donovan Mitchell played despite being questionable with a hamstring injury. Was that the right decision?
A: The hosts disagreed on this point. Ethan Sands argued that Mitchell should not have played. While Mitchell started strong with 12 points in the first quarter, he only scored three more for the remainder of the game and “did not look like himself.” Sands believes the team, which is typically overly cautious with injuries, should have saved the player from himself, especially early in the season, and used it as an opportunity to see how the offense would function with Evan Mobley as the focal point. Chris Fedor countered that if there was any significant risk of re-injury, the team and Mitchell would have been more cautious. He believes the issue was more about “heavy legs” from a difficult road schedule (the third game in four nights) rather than a serious hamstring problem. Fedor noted that while Mitchell looked like he was laboring, both the player and the coaching staff described it as manageable.
Q: What is the most significant problem facing the Cavaliers through the first five games?
A: Both hosts agree that the team has a serious and correctable rebounding problem. Through their first five games, the Cavaliers have been outrebounded by a total of 21 and have won the rebounding battle only once. Against the Celtics, a team not known for its interior presence this season, they were “manhandled” on the glass. Players like Josh Minott and Neemias Queta each had five offensive rebounds. Head coach Kenny Atkinson has identified rebounding as the number one issue, yet it hasn’t consistently improved. The hosts find this particularly troubling for a team that predominantly plays a two-big lineup with Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley, as rebounding should be a distinct advantage of that system.
Q: Beyond team-wide issues, how is Evan Mobley’s individual development progressing on offense?
A: The hosts describe Mobley’s expanded offensive role as a period of “clear growing pains.” He’s being given more responsibility to initiate the offense from the top of the key, but it’s leading to “clunkiness” and inconsistency. Against Boston, he shot 7-of-19 from the field, including 2-of-8 from 3-point range. The hosts suggest he is resorting to what he thinks the team needs rather than playing to his strengths, possibly trying to emulate the physicality of other young stars instead of leaning on his finesse skills. However, the organization seems willing to endure this “short-term pain for long-term gain,” believing that if Mobley masters this new dimension, it will make the team much better in the long run. They are not yet at a point where they feel they need to abandon the experiment, even if it contributes to the team losing its offensive identity in the short term.
Q: With several key players injured, how is the team’s identity being affected?
A: The absence of Darius Garland, Max Strus, and Sam Merrill has made the team “really thin really quickly.” This has exposed weaknesses that were previously masked by a historically great offense last season. Without their primary ball-handlers and shooters, the offense has lost its dynamic nature and can no longer be relied upon to save them on nights when they struggle in other areas, like rebounding. The hosts conclude that the current roster construction forces the team to focus on “little things” — winning the battle of the boards, forcing turnovers, and getting bench scoring — because their offense is no longer explosive enough to overcome those deficits.
Q: Were there any bright spots or positives to take away from the blowout loss to Boston?
A: Yes, the performance of young players Jaylon Tyson and Craig Porter Jr. was a clear highlight. In his minutes, Tyson was particularly impressive, scoring 19 points on 8-of-11 shooting and playing pesky defense with three steals. Donovan Mitchell called Tyson’s performance the “highlight of the night.” Craig Porter Jr. also played well, contributing on both ends of the floor and showcasing a developing 3-point shot. The hosts noted that the coaching staff likes to test Tyson alongside high-level players, and both he and Porter are key to the team’s strategy of applying full-court defensive pressure. Their energy and ability to disrupt opposing offenses are seen as crucial, especially while the team struggles to find consistency on both ends of the floor.
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Transcript
NOTE: This transcript was generated by artificial intelligence and could contain misspellings and errors.
Ethan Sands: What up, Cavs Nation? I’m your host, Ethan Sands, and I’m back with another episode of the Wine and Gold Talk podcast. Joining me today from Boston, coming straight out of TD Garden, Chris, Peter. And don’t mind him, he might have a couple of hiccups along the show, but he. He’s here to give us the insight, what he’s heard, he’s seen and what went down in tonight’s 125, 105 loss to the Boston Celtics. Chris, I want to get into this really quickly and I want to be very pointed where I say this. Donovan Mitchell came up on the injury report right before tonight’s game with a hamstring injury. It was questionable if he was going to play. It was a toss up in the air until he went on ESPN or talked to you about whether or not he was going to play. And Chris, I’m going to say this. I don’t think he should have played tonight. Sure, he got out to a great start in the first quarter. He was able to put up numbers. He had 12 points, four of four from deep. But after that, he had three points for the remainder of the contest. And, and he did not look like himself. And we’re talking about a team that has been overly cautious with all injuries this season dating back to last year as well. And we know that there is a larger plan for this team, particularly Donovan Mitchell in getting him to the playoffs. I do not think the decision to play Donovan tonight was smart. I think there were other options. I think there was a chance to see what Evan Mobley would have looked like without him. And sure, the offense in itself is. Was clunky tonight without Darius Garland, Max Drew and Samaro. So of course Donovan Mitchell wanted to play. But I think this is a situation where you got to save your player from himself, especially this early on into the season.
Chris Fedor: I think if the Cavs and Donovan felt like Ethan there was any chance of, of further injury or, or aggravating the injury or whatever the case may be, something that would cause him to miss a few games here in, in the next couple of weeks or something like that, then I definitely think he would have taken a cautious approach, and I think the Cavs would have taken a cautious approach, but I think it was just precautionary from the very beginning, just minor tightness in his hamstring and it wasn’t something that they were overly concerned about. Jesus Christ, these hiccups are ridiculous. And I get these hiccups. And I’m telling you man, like they last hours. I have been known to have hiccups for four, four straight hours. And they’re so uncomfortable, they’re so violent. My head goes bopping back and forth. So I’m gonna continue to try and do this as best I can. I one time got the hiccups actually in the last 30 minutes, 30 minutes of a radio show that I was doing. There was no way for me to do anything there. There was no saving me. It was a solo radio show. I couldn’t just have dead air. I just kind of like had to go through it. And I’m hoping doing this, I’ll just talk my way through it or maybe something will startle me outside or something like that. I don’t know. I’ve. I’ve tried everything. But I. I think with Donovan again, if. If it was an injury that threatened his well being or his fitness or his ability to play in the next couple of games, I definitely think they, they would have held him out. The sense that I got in talking to him pregame and talking to him after the game, there probably is some hamstring tightness, but it’s more heavy legs. This is the third game in four nights for the Cavs. It’s been a road heavy schedule to start the year for the first five have been on the road and even the game where they came back home, it was come back home for less than 48 hours and then leave again. So I just think like all of that together has caused this minor issue for Donovan with the hamstring. And I’m with you, he didn’t look like himself. He looked like he was laboring. And I asked Kenny post game about it. I asked Donovan if he re aggravated it or if there was anything that got worse as the game went on after the first quarter because he was great in the first quarter. He made every single three that he took. He was doing the things that he usually does against the Celtics. The Celtics are a team that he historically has played well against. Playing in the TD garden has historically been a really good place for him. But I just think to me it did look like he was, he was laboring. But the way that he explained it, as I said, is. Is more heavy legs than hamstring tightness or, or something that that was. That was bothering him enough that that would have held him out of the game.
Ethan Sands: It’s obvious to what the Cavs are trying to do when it comes to his minute load. Obviously in the beginning of the season, trying to prepare him more so than they did last year for the playoff. The vigorous amount of minutes that he was going to play. He played 36 minutes in New York. He played 35 minutes in Brooklyn, he played 33 minutes in Milwaukee, he played 29 minutes in Detroit, and he didn’t even play a majority of the fourth quarter. He played 32 minutes in Boston in the blowout loss tonight. I do just think, like, there’s a middle ground that I feel like the Cavs need to find. And we remember last year that Donovan was the highest average player when it comes to the Cavs. He averaged around 30. And I just think there is a different level to where his intensity is the beginning of the season and Kenny Atkinson has spoke to it, right? He is obviously trying to get this Cavs team, push this Cavs team, propel this Cavs team to a different level. And I understand it and I respect it and I love the fire and all the good things that come with it. And he’s had some great performances, right? Three 30 point performances in five nights. But there’s also the understanding that it’s October. You don’t have Darius, you don’t have Max, you don’t have Sam Merrill right now. And against a Boston team that was more so lacking post presence, interior presence, I think this could have been a really good game to try out what Jared Allen and Evan Mobley were capable of. And obviously maybe it would have gone better if they would have had that focal point. But that didn’t actually end up being the case with the Cavs as they were dismantled interiorly. And it was against a team that came into the season asking who was going to be their starting center. And we came off a game against the Milwaukee Bucks, came off a game against the Detroit Pistons with physical interior presences, and we’re like, okay, maybe New York was a fluke, Chris, I don’t know what’s going on. But against teams that don’t necessarily have a interior presence, but have players around them that are willing to do what it takes to get a rebound. This Cavs team has struggled at least thus far into the season.
Chris Fedor: Yeah, I think it’s fair to say through five games, Ethan, they have a rebounding problem and it doesn’t mean that it’s not correctable. But through the first five games, they’ve been out rebounded by a total of 21. They have won the rebounding battle once in the first five games. Once. That’s it. And tonight against Boston, like, are you kidding me? Really? I think somewhere Josh Minot is, is in the Boston area, grabbing another rebound at this point, because he was just a menace on the glass, the Cavs had no answers for him. He had five offensive rebounds. Keita had five offensive rebounds. I’m pretty sure Luca Garza came off the bench out of nowhere and had five offensive rebounds. Like, it’s hard if. If a team like the Celtics is going to make 21 threes and they’re going to run their offense with surgical precision the way that they did, and then they’re going to win the battle of the boards by as much as they did, including on the offensive rebounds. Like, that’s just going to be a really bad formula for the Cavs. And Kenny Atkinson said, I think one of the troubling things is that, you know, Kenny has talked about the rebounding since opening night, and it just hasn’t gotten consistently better. It certainly hasn’t from Jared Allen. It hasn’t from Larry Nance Jr. Off the bench. It hasn’t from Evan Mobley. It just there. There have been nights where they have looked better on the boards, and, you know, Evan’s been more active, and Jared Allen has played with, like, a level of physicality and toughness and stuff like that. But it’s just. It’s not consistent enough. It’s not consistent enough for Kenny. It’s not consistent enough for a team that plays too big as predominantly. Like, that’s the other thing. You know what I mean? Like, there has to be some kind of advantage that you’re getting by playing the two bigs and the advantage that you’re supposed to have. Obviously, rim protection’s a big deal. You know, protecting the paint, that’s a big deal. But. But you should. You should do a better job on the boards if you’re going to play this kind of lineup. Look, and I know it’s not all on Jarrett, and I know it’s not all on Evan in the way that the game is played today. There are longer rebounds, more teams are crashing the offensive class, and, like, all those things are accurate. But to get manhandled by the Celtics, ah, that shouldn’t happen, not to this team. And look, part of this is it’s a bad night, and teams in the NBA, they have bad nights. But when you start to see, like, a trend developing and it’s clear that Kenny Atkinson sees a bad trend developing, it’s going to be time to look at the film and really figure out, okay, like, what kinds of things do we have to do differently? Maybe it’s a style thing. Maybe it’s a systematic thing, maybe it’s a scheme related thing, but what kinds of things do we have to do differently to correct this problem? And I I think it’s fair to classify, even though it’s only five games, even though it’s only October, I think in the short term I think it’s fair to classify it as a problem because the Cavs have not been good enough when it comes to rebounding.
Ethan Sands: If you’re not going to be good at rebounding, you need to somehow make an impact in some capability on the floor, right? And Jared Allen and Evan Mobley, that’s also attacking the post on the offensive end of the floor. And I think particularly for Evan Mobley, this is a player who we’ve been talking about trying to figure out how he can make an impact on that end of the floor and answering the questions of the early season struggles of you having more offensive initiation responsibilities, more creation responsibilities, more just usage of the ball in your hands and trying to get active offensively. And it feels like Evan Mobley has resorted to what he thinks the Cavs need rather than what has been successful for him in the past. Because 2 of 8 from 3 not necessarily what you need from him. 7 of 19 from the field and I feel like there’s more to that when we talk about getting to the rim, getting into the bodies of defenders, getting into the spots where you know you are successful. And obviously that also comes with starting above the break, maybe starting him lower into the actions and allowing him to create from the elbow or the free throw line or the the dunker spot. Maybe that’s what he needs to get more enveloped in the offense rather than stretching and stressing him having so much initiation from the top of the key. But he’s learning and one of the things that I also think he’s learning, I’m going to be critical here. I think he’s also watching the film of what’s going on in San Antonio and realizing that Victor Weyama is moving players. And I feel like Evan Mobley is trying to do that too much rather than leaning on the finesse skills that have helped him to this point in his career. Especially when you talk about for an entire team. They were 17 of 52 from deep, which is just 32.7%. And yet 52 of their 87 attempts were from long range. Especially in a game without Sam Merrow, Darius Garland, Max Drew. The game plan should have been to get to the paint and abuse the lack of big men talent on paper that the Celtics supposedly had coming into the contest, but that simply wasn’t the case.
Chris Fedor: They were trying to do it early, and they just weren’t having success doing it. You know, Jarrett fumbled a couple of passes. Evan Mobley was getting the ball stripped away from him. Kenny Atkinson actually believes that, like, part of their problem was when they got into the paint, whether it was Jarrett, whether it was Evan, whether it was Donovan. You know, the Celtics formed a wall and. And bothered and disrupted the Cavs offense more when they attempted to do that than when they were playing out on the perimeter and taking those threes. And I think the thing that we know about the Celtics, too, is that the style that they play, the switchiness that they play, it forces you into offensive stagnation, and sometimes it forces you into a bunch of threes. But I agree with you. Like, I think this. This thing with Evan is. Is clear growing pains, and. And I think Evan is just going to have to work through it. And, you know, I don’t want to sit here and classify and say that the Cavs are not trying to win games, because they are, but I think that they’re at a point and they’re. They’re different from some other teams where I think the line of demarcation is. They’re not trying to win at all cost. They’re keeping the big picture in mind. And even though this Evan Mobley experiment on the offensive end so far has not yielded the kinds of results that the Cavs would want, they’re just not in a place where they feel like it would benefit them to go away from it. It’s. It’s causing clunkiness. I mean, Kenny Atkinson was trying to be nice about his characterization of the offense tonight, but it wasn’t good enough. And he was basically saying, like, we have lost our identity here for a majority of these first five games, including tonight against the Celtics. But I. I think that’s going to happen when you’re trying all these different things within the offense, because the hope is that even if you have these. These early struggles, you’re going to benefit from them, and it’s going to make you a better team because you have to learn how to work through them. And because if it comes together the way that the Cavs envision that it will, then all of the sudden they’ll have, like, another reliable, consistent source of offense that is different than. Than what it has been in the past, and it just provides a different offensive dimension to them. So I think even though it looks wonky, even though it feels like They’ve lost their identity for the most part in the first five games. I think they’re okay with it to some degree because it’s in their mind. It’s, it’s just short term pain for long term game now, like if it gets to a point where the Cavs are deep into the season, the playoffs are closing in and the Evan Mobley is a big time focal point offensively, if that’s not working, if that’s not in the best interest of the Cavs winning games, then maybe they reconfigure some things and they rethink their approach. But, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence, Ethan, that two of the highest usage games of, of Evan Mobley’s entire career, not just this season, are, are some of the ones where the Cavs just didn’t look like themselves offensively because it’s just not what we’re used to seeing. It’s not what we grew accustomed to last year when the Cavs were overwhelming opponents and they had this historically great offense and, and if Evan is going to be more of a focal point offensively and it’s clear that he is, then, then he’s going to have to find the pass shoot balance and it’s going to have to be, it’s going to have to be more of a balance than certainly what it has been at the beginning of this season.
Ethan Sands: Yeah, Chris, and I don’t want to make you suffer too much longer.
Chris Fedor: So Weasel. Outrageous, isn’t it? Like it doesn’t matter how much I talk, it doesn’t matter what I do. I’ve been holding my breath in Beats Queen. Like I’m doing whatever I can and I just like it’s not working.
Ethan Sands: Well, here’s my last take on this and we’ll get us out of here.
Chris Fedor: Try and scare me. I’m going to turn off the. I’m going to turn off the podcast and then all of a sudden the hiccups are going to go away or something like that. I don’t know.
Ethan Sands: Well, I hope so for, for your sanity. But my last take on this episode and on this game is that over the last couple of games in particular, like the minutes from Jaylon Tyson and Craig Porter Jr. Obviously Jaylon Tyson stepped in for an injured Sam Merrow in tonight’s game, playing Alongside Donovan Mitchell, DeAndre Hunter, Evan Mobley and Jared Allen. And we’ve known that Kenny Agustin and the staff likes to get Jalen more minutes next to high level players. They like to test where he’s going to be obviously this season, but also in a few years as well. He was 8 of 11 for the field, 2 of 5 from 3, had 19 points, 5 rebounds and he was pesky defensively, had 3 steals ultimately resulting in him fouling out with 6 fouls. But Craig Quarter Jr also played 22 minutes, 2 of 4 from the field, 2 of 3 from deep. I’m very much enjoying how his game is developing, especially his three point shot, four assists and I just think these two guys are going to be important, especially if Sam Merrow’s out for a while. Don’t know exactly how much longer area Scarlet’s going to be out, but the defensive pressure and that’s something that we’ve talked about a lot this season when we talk about how the Cavs are getting up into offenses in the backcourt guarding 94ft. Jalen Tyson and Craig Porter Jr. Are two of the mainstays in that kind of system. And I think it’s very important to what the Cavs are doing and what they’re going to have to do when it comes to slowing offenses down, particularly if they’re going to continue to struggle to on that end of the floor. Forcing the teams to work with later into the shot clock is going to help them look less bad when it comes to this part of the season, especially when we talk about how they’ve looked to start the year outside of their game in Detroit where they were stellar. It hasn’t been consistent on either end of the floor for this team after five games into the 2025, 2026 season.
Chris Fedor: Well, Donovan after the game said that Jalen’s performance was the highlight of the night. It’s really like the one thing that Donovan was actually happy with now he did pull Craig aside before everybody left the locker room and, and he told Craig like, hey, I’m proud of you. You did good tonight too. But in his post game scrum, he singled out Jalen Tyson and he called it the highlight of the night. And the more comfortable Jalen’s gonna look, the better the Cavs are going to be because like we can’t lose sight Ethan, of the fact. And this doesn’t mean it’s an excuse for everything that that has happened for this team in the first five games and certainly doesn’t mean it’s an excuse for, how did Kenny phrase it? Getting 20 in your mug the way that the Cavs did against the Celtics tonight. A Celtics team that nobody thinks is going to be a legitimate title contender, nobody thinks is going to be near the top of the Eastern Conference. So it doesn’t excuse what, what happened tonight in the poor play that the Cavs had. But, but I think we can’t lose sight of the fact that two very important pieces are, are still sidelined, recovering from off season surgery. And Sam Merrill missed tonight’s game because he’s got a hip contusion and he could be looking at a multi game absence with that. He wasn’t well enough to go. And that’s a big piece of this team when you’re already talking about what they’re missing. And if you take three of the top eight out of their nightly rotation and I thought Lonzo struggled tonight, I thought the minutes from Larry Ants Jr. Were not so great. So if you take three of the top eight out of your rotation and you don’t get as much as you would like from Lonzo and you don’t get as much as what you would like from Larry, this team becomes really thin really quickly and we can’t lose sight of that because that plays part in how they perform and it plays part in some of the wonkiness that we’re seeing, some of the growing pains that we’re seeing too. I mean, I think some of this, this offensive inconsistency that we’re seeing in the first five games, part of it’s going to be remedied when Darius Garland comes back and you have another ball dominant player that can break down defenses, that can get into the paint, that can cause havoc in a variety of ways. Sam Merrill missing. They lost movement element to their offense, they lost some gravity, they lost some three point shooting, certainly some offensive firepower. Like all these things are real that the Cavs are dealing with. And that’s why I think, you know, from the very beginning, even going back to the preseason, Kenny Atkinson has labeled this team a work in progress. And I was talking to somebody in the NBA before the game and we were on the court, we were watching Donovan warm up and stuff like that and they were giving me their thoughts on what they’ve seen from the Cavs and the limited time that they’ve been watching them. And they wanted my thoughts on the Cavs too, like individual players and just the team as a whole. And I think the phrase that I used was just that I said this team is very much a work in progress. And they look through the first five games, including tonight against the Celtics, a team that is a work in progress, that, that has some things that they need to figure out. And I think going into Friday’s game at the top of that list, for everything that we’ve talked about on this podcast through all the hiccuping, at the top of that list is going to be rebounding. They have to get better at that because the belief is that that is very much in their control.
Ethan Sands: Yep. And I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I said, throughout the entire off season, we talked about what the Cavs needed for this team to be successful. And I continuously said an enforcer, someone that will bang bodies and just be a guy that will go get it. We’ve talked to Kenny Atkinson multiple times. He’s talked to guys like Tristan Thompson who are simply known for rebounding. And the main thing that they continuously say, which is a skill to do is just going to get it. It doesn’t matter where it is. It doesn’t matter who’s near you, doesn’t matter if the ball is a long rebound or if it’s right off the rim. Whatever it is, a rebounder goes and gets it. Jamie Bickers out said it after the Pistons game. Rebounders rebound. You don’t have to teach them the rebound. They’re just going to go get it. So I definitely think, especially against the long Toronto Raptors, it’s going to be an interesting game on Friday with a lot of expectations. And I agree with you, Chris. It is only five games into the season and we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. But there are things to be concerned about because not everything that we’re talking about can be fixed when Darius Garland or Max just returns to Atlanta.
Chris Fedor: And it’s funny that you bring up the rebounding thing and the commentary on it and just go get it. I was trying to have a conversation with Evan Mobley about rebounding and just a bunch of different aspects. Like, how different is it these days? Do you have to change your technique because of teams crashing, or do you have to position yourself in a different place because of how many teams are taking 40 to 50 threes and the longer rebounds that come from that? And he just kept saying over and over and over again, we just have to go get the ball, we have to go get the ball, we have to be more aggressive, and we have to go get the ball. And I think that tells you kind of where his mindset is. And it tells you what. What Kenny Atkinson seems to think is the problem as well is that they’re just, they’re not playing with enough force when it comes to going after rebounds. They’re not playing with enough aggressiveness when it comes to going after rebounds. They’re not playing with enough. I think he used the word juice when it comes to going after rebounds. And Jared’s never going to be Andre Drummond, right? Like he’s never going to be Rudy Gobert, I don’t think. But another single digit rebound game for Jared Allen. I mean, he’s playing more than 30 minutes a night at the center spot. It can’t keep happening like that. If you think back to last year and the activity and the energy that he was playing with and all that kind of stuff, he was basically a walking double double. You could almost pencil him in for double digit rebounds. You know how many games this year he’s got Double digit rebounds?
Ethan Sands: 1.
Chris Fedor: 1. And it came against Milwaukee. That unsurprisingly, was the only game that the Cavs finished with more rebounds than the opponent. So no, it’s not entirely Jarrett and it’s not entirely Evan and there are other components to this, but it’s one of those situations where it feels like how Jarrett plays, how he rebounds, how he defends his level of engagement and activity. It doesn’t play the part in whether the Cavs are successful or not, but it plays a significant part. 4 out of 5 games and single digit rebounds for a starting center in today’s NBA. Who was a walking double double last year? Like, nope, can’t happen. It’s gotta be better. I mean, Josh Minot. Did you know who Josh Minot was before today’s game?
Ethan Sands: I did not.
Chris Fedor: He doubled Jared Allen’s rebound total. He’s long, he’s athletic. Jesus. He’s long, he’s athletic. He’s. He’s basically all arms and legs, but he was just more active, he was just more energetic. He was just more forceful. And the same thing with Keita and the same thing with Luke Garza. So it’s, it’s interesting too, Ethan, because when they had the offense that they had last year, as prolific as it was, like some of these minor things kind of got brushed to the side because they just overcame whatever weaknesses they were showing because their offense was historically great. Like, yeah, we might have lost the rebound battle, but we still put up 120. We still put up 125. So like they could always lean on the fact that, that their offense was going to save them or the three point shot was going to be the great equalizer and it was going to mask some of these flaws, stuff like that. And I just think like the way that they’re currently constructed with what they’re missing in this current state. Some of these little things are going to show up more and they’re going to have to figure out that, like, no, we’re not as explosive on the offensive end. We’re not as dynamic on the offensive end. We’re going to have to do these little things. We’re going to have to win the battle of the boards, we’re going to have to win the bench scoring. We’re going to have to force more turnovers than the other team. We’re going to have to do like all these different things because our offense just isn’t going to save us the way that it did most nights last year.
Ethan Sands: And I, I remember last year we used to laugh at teams shooting 50 plus three pointers in a night. Now the Cavs are the ones doing it. But that’s as a side note to how I wanted to end today’s podcast. Obviously, we talked about and held accountable. That’s the big thing, right? Evan Mobley and Jared Allen. Evan Mobley, this is a second night, second game in a row where he finished with a double, double 19 point, 11 rebounds. And yes, he still could have been better. There was a lot of things he could have done better in tonight’s game. But Kenny Atkinson, when he talks about that rebound, and I watched the watch the post game press conference, he said it’s fixable. We can do it. If we lock in, we can do it. We’ve shown that we can do it. We did it. He didn’t say this, but they did it against Giannis and Miles Turner. You can do it if that is a main focus. But he also said the rebounding was one of the number one things on their billboard coming into tonight’s game.
Chris Fedor: That was the number one. The number one.
Ethan Sands: And that is what is alarming about tonight’s performance because we talked about this on a recent podcast. Chris, When Kenny Agatson sounds the alarm on something he admits the very next game, they respond. But a couple of games afterwards, I don’t know, man. It’s not necessarily the same thing. They sometimes forget about what the focus is. Sometimes they move on to the next problem. Well, over the first five games, we can all admit there is one major problem of this team. There’s a lot of other minutiae that we can go into. But at the top of that billboard, rebounding has been an issue for this COWS team. And if they want to get where they gotta go, as I said before, it’s not going to necessarily get fixed when Darius Garland, Max Juice, Sam Merrill return to the floor. They got to find it from their bigs and they got to find it from guys off their bench. Dean Wade, Larry Nance, you need to do Ben.
Chris Fedor: They’re 26th and rebounding.
Ethan Sands: Just overall, we’re looking at stats really quickly. DeAndre Hunter, not known as a rebounder. Right?
Chris Fedor: Right.
Ethan Sands: He got the same amount of rebounds. The 6 foot 9 center Jared out. Gotta tell you something, it is about players around them also showing that effort, but it’s gotta come from being led by the big guys. But Chris, I don’t wanna make you suffer anymore. With all that being said, that’ll wrap up today’s episode of the Wine and Gold Talk podcast. But remember to become a Cavs insider and interact with Chris, me and Jimmy by subscribing to Subtext. Tomorrow’s a hey Chris day. Ew. If Chris does not have the hiccups. So send in your questions and if we don’t get to them tomorrow, next week for sure. But the only way you can do so is sign up for a 14 day blue trial or visit cleveland.com Cavs and click on the blue bar at the top of the page. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. All you have to do is text the word stop. It’s easy. We can tell you that the people who sign up stick around because this is the best way to get insider coverage on the Cavs from me, Chris and Jimmy. This isn’t just our podcast, it’s your podcast. And the only way to have your voice heard is through subtext. Y’ all be safe. We out.
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