Pacers vs. Cavaliers has shown there is one big difference between the two teams

05/13/2025 10:23 AM

The Cavaliers will need to find their fight if they're going to stay alive vs. the fiery and physical Pacers.

Maybe you've been in a fight. Or maybe you've watched from a safe distance, a fight unfolding. I mean an abrupt fight, out in the world, not a match staged with tickets and accompanying odds. In the first stages, it's that pantomiming of "will they, won't they." Like a jouncing, spritely dance. Better yet, like birds doing a jouncing dance. There's an intrinsic hesitation no matter how intentioned the participants appear, even if that hesitation is borne out of a blood-alcohol level that shifts limbs in slow motion.

Nobody really wants to fight. Even the people we claim are spoiling for one, like if they aren't soon granted the opportunity they will burst, overripe with aggression, even that fight is borne out of something else, another trigger. Pride, fear, quite often nothing to do with anger, only anger's underlying prompts. When cortisol and adrenaline flood the brain, the body animates, and then nine times out of ten the response is flight over fight. It's how we as a species have stuck around for so long.

The analogy of a fight in basketball is a favored one. Which team lost theirs, like it was a pair of keys, and which had it on display, like a series of paintings hung in a gallery. The analogy is an oversimplified and reductive one, flattening conditions and mechanics that form this type of "fight" — aptitude, razor-thin decision-making, conditioning, an entire roster clicking at once, luck — and offering instead a single-word, crude translation, and yet…

And yet. What came to mind, unbidden, watching Jarrett Allen collide with Myles Turner, specifically Turner's elbow, in Game 3? Or when barely into the second quarter of Game 4, with Indiana pressing on offense, Darius Garland walked from the key up to meet the possession with his hands clasped over his head in that universal gesture for "oh, god"? It was the phrase, Where's the fight?

Even when De'Andre Hunter stalked toward a stationary Benedict Mathurin and shoved him hard with two flat hands to Mathurin's chest, or Max Strus separately got himself tangled up with Pascal Siakam and Tyrese Haliburton after whistles and off to the side of the action, the phrase came on like a furrowed brow — Where's the fight?

Cleveland isn't down three and heading into a possible elimination game because they are passive or "soft", but they are now staring up at a deficit they'll have to scramble to ascend because of a certain inertia.

In their shared postgame after Game 4's loss in Indiana, Darius Garland and Evan Mobley were asked why they didn't come out with force, or enough force. It took 20 seconds, in which the buzz of the room's lights droned loudest, for Garland to answer. "Mm," he started, shaking his head softly, "just didn't." He shrugged.

Garland did then offer a longer explanation of what went wrong — too many turnovers, being turned over so much when the Cavs are used to forcing them on opponents, getting chased from their spots — but when he mentioned force again it was responsive. "If they hit first, we gotta hit back," he said. The onus, still, secondary. Reactive.

The Pacers don't have some surplus of size on the Cavs. Aside from Turner and Siakam — the latter of whom doesn't really use his size as an automatic extension for upped physicality — Mobley is bigger than Obi Toppin, or any of the forwards Rick Carlisle is throwing at him in the Pacers zone defense. What's more, that zone was the same strategy Cleveland used in their lone win so far this series, so it suddenly seeming so overwhelming when turned back on them came as a shock. And anyway, size, while daunting, isn't the deciding factor in a fight. Plenty of "lightweights" have taken down their version of Goliath with footwork and a well-timed hook to the chin – just look at T.J. McConnell.

What the Pacers do have on the Cavs is speed. Their ability to get out and run. That paired with their size has been the wearing down factor that's made Cleveland look preternaturally exhausted all series, like a team that's been body-swapped with the one we watched ace the regular season with dexterity and aplomb.

But if a fight is the last thing the human brain wants for us, how, now, do the Cavs go out and get it?

The good news is that a team with a 64-18 regular season win record, that was first overall in their offensive rating, that rosters the Defensive Player of the Year in Mobley and the league's leader in field goal percentage (.706), true shooting and offensive rating in Allen, doesn't have to go out and prospect some entirely new resource to regain their competitive identity. That part is already deeply ingrained, if somewhat obstructed at the moment. The bad news is that it was the web-like ability of Donovan Mitchell, unlocked this season by Cleveland's coaching staff asking the guard to take on a little bit of everything, that deployed these multifaceted strengths. Without Mitchell, as could be the case in Game 5, the Cavs will continue to look adrift — rising to ticky-tack provocations and flailing in the heavy-handed isolation the Pacers are deploying against them.

Briefly — because as much as it's been mentioned in the last 48 hours, it really isn't the fundamental discrepancy here — the Cavs are and have been injured. Those injuries barely mattered to Indiana. When you're running at someone full tilt, about to take their legs out from under them, you don't change your trajectory because you notice them favouring a foot. It's still shoulder first, right to the gut. There is no team in the postseason at this point playing 100% healthy. There was no team playing that way past the 41-game mark of the regular season.

The notion of Indiana's force, and the line of questioning that Garland first seemed at a loss responding to, originated with Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson. After the neat folding of his team in Indiana, Atkinson took to the podium and told the story of the game.

"Complete domination," he sighed, "in every facet." It was a short story.

Pressed for more details and Atkinson said the Pacers brought the game to another level and despite preparing for that possibility, the Cavs didn't match it. Instead, they were forced to start their offensive sets at half court, were out-rebounded, and never made it to any of their spots. It was physical domination, Atkinson said, "Their force was greater, in every sense."

Force, whether in the abstract sense of harnessed energy or the repetitive wallops the Pacers delivered to the Cavs, is central to fight. Two forces meet, decide whether to collide, and careen toward or away from each other. We tend to have better memory for fight, for battles, than we do for loose notions of effort. Garland proved as much when he referred to the Cavs, as a franchise, being down 3-1 before, like the reverberations of fight could be uncovered in a fossil record (that's a turn of phrase and not an ageist dig at LeBron James, who led that Cavs team back from the brink to win).

The problem with waxing nostalgic about deficits conquered in the past is that it pre-ages the present. Framed that way, then the threat of elimination shifts from immediate to distant, and the lack of urgency the Cavs have shown in every game of this series, even their lone win, makes unfortunate sense. Framed that way and it's not that the impulse to fight is foreign to this group, it's that the urgency of the playoffs never arrived. Cleveland is still playing like the tidy, 64-win team that conquered the regular season, eyes fixed on some distant horizon of eventuality where the team we were so sure would go on to win just does, by virtue of what came before. Not to be crude, but you can't see someone taking a swing at you when you're looking, quite intently, the other way.