ATLANTA — There’s a blueprint to beat the Cavs, and the entire league is aware of it. It starts with running right past them.
For all the talk of being a defense-first group, Cleveland keeps stubbing its toe on the most basic part of defense. Getting back.
Friday’s contest against the Hawks didn’t uncover anything complicated in [Atlanta’s 130-123 win at State Farm Arena.](https://www.cleveland.com/cavs/2025/11/cavs-get-knocked-out-of-nba-cup-by-hawks-for-second-year-in-a-row-130-123.html) They ran. They kept running. And the Cavs never found a way to stay in front of them.
They torched the Cavs 36-17 in fastbreak points, slicing through possessions where some of those moments felt almost surreal. A 94-foot sprint ending with Atlanta gliding uncontested to the rim, the Cavalier closest to the play trailing by a full stride or two.
“We showed them a couple of clips at halftime where they just run, literally running by us,” Cavs head coach Kenny Atkinson said. “...That’s what they do. That’s their strength. They outplayed us, quite simply. Outplayed us, outcoached us.”
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It’s the paradox of the Atkinson era.
The Cavs fire threes ad nauseam, a continuation of the approach that vaulted them into last season’s elite offensive class. But those same triples come with a risk.
Every miss is the start of a jailbreak the other way. What should be a harmless long rebound becomes something closer to an outlet pass for teams who already want to play fast, especially if Cleveland finds itself looking around for a teammate to grab the board or find his man while the opposition is already in motion.
“We shoot a lot of threes, so it’s a lot of long shots,” Garland said. “So just gotta get back, talk in transition. Just find a body. We don’t have to go to our man all the time. Just find a body in transition we could face on the back end.”
The Hawks didn’t invent this. They’re simply the newest team to exploit a blueprint that was sketched clearly enough last spring for the entire league to trace.
The Indiana Pacers cracked it open in the Eastern Conference semifinals, turning that series into a five-game track meet and forcing Cleveland’s defense to live in chaos. They attacked after makes, after misses, even after Cavs players briefly celebrated good possessions. The ripple effects from that series have lingered into this season.
Cleveland’s transition defense is vulnerable.
“For us to be as good as we are defensively, the way to beat us — people think — is to try to push,” Donovan Mitchell said. “And we just have to adjust. And we didn’t tonight. But that’s the upsetting part.”
Teams listened.
Toronto. Miami. Chicago. They all consistently use tactics to dismantle what the Cavs are built around: their two big men. Teams are unveiling small lineups, using quick outlets and nonstop pressure. Make the Cavs’ bigs run. Make everyone else think twice. See if the focus slips for even half a step.
And right now, it isn’t consistent.
Atkinson has tried to balance crashing the offensive glass with leaking out by splitting responsibilities. But sometimes it merely creates hesitation.
The players closest to the rim — Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen — are ideal interior anchors, but no big can reliably win repeated full-court footraces against a guard with a head start and the wind at his back.
And because the pace of the league continues to spike, the Cavs’ margin for error has evaporated. So they’re stuck in the middle of wanting to play fast, but getting beaten at their own desired game.
That’s where frustration seeps in.
“Get our a— back,” Mitchell said. “It’s not one singular person, right? It’s everybody. It’s the name of the game. Credit to them, they found something and kept continuing to do it. But we lost solely off of that. We gotta get back on defense, and that’s how they got a lot of their points. What’s frustrating is we just couldn’t do that. And it’s a mental thing. ... We got to find a way. We’ve struggled with it.
“And that’s ultimately why we lost.”
Cleveland’s locker room described the solution as simple, at least in theory. Get back. Talk early. Mark the first threat. Survive long enough for help to arrive. But those steps come faster than most teams realize until they’re living inside the problem.
“It’s the communication that you got to have very quickly because they’re running,” Mobley said about what is most difficult. “It’s not like a halfcourt where it’s set, and you can talk about switching. It’s in transition, so you gotta talk and communicate who got who and figure that out on the fly, basically. So that’s probably the hardest part. And we just gotta get better, do a better job with that.”
The moments where the Cavs didn’t? They were damning.
One Cleveland defender stranded two-on-one, sometimes three-on-one, after doing the hard part — contesting, slowing down the ball — only for the second layer of the defense to never appear. Sometimes that lone defender could do nothing but throw his arms up and think internally what everyone else in the arena was asking: “Where was everyone else?”
That’s the tension now.
The Cavs aren’t trying to reinvent themselves as a grind-it-out halfcourt team. They believe in their pace, in their threes, in their defensive ceiling. But the teams with the right blend of speed, spacing and guards who can turn a rebound into a runway will keep attacking this soft spot.
Not every roster can do it. Not every opponent has the athletes, the wiring or the commitment. But the ones that do? They’ve seen the blueprint. And once it’s out there, teams will hammer it until it breaks.
Until the Cavs fix it, they’ll keep seeing opponents fly past them like Friday night in Atlanta. A blur of colors, a streak of missed assignments, a solvable problem turning into a recurring wound.