He was the first guy in the gym, two days after he was out of the lineup.
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“It’s about it being a brotherhood around here and not letting anything happen to each other”, James said.
“Every journey’s different. When you’re in it, it absolutely sucks, when you’re in a rut like this”, Irving said. “After the game we took a step forward”. I’ll leave it at that. Instead, it was veteran shooter James Jones who voiced out his frustration.
In the second half against the Bulls, the Cavs seemed disinterested on both ends of the floor, allowing 37 points in the third quarter and passively hoisting 12 3s in the fourth, missing nine. The Bulls had a 51-44 edge on the boards. Rajon Rondo racked up 15 assists for the 75th time in his career.
This is the Cavs team that was down 1-3 to the Golden State Warriors in last year’s finals and still won in seven games.
“It was obviously a tough month, but who knows?” asked Cavs power forward Kevin Love. Jimmy Butler scored 25 points and even Denzel Valentine, in a slightly disappointing rookie season, helped out with 12 points. “We’ve had enough talk over the last couple of weeks”. And, for good measure, they swept their season series against the defending champions, staying just one game out of the Eastern Conference playoff hunt.
“Guys got together in Chicago last night”, Lue said March 31 before the Cavs played the 76ers at Quicken Loans Arena. “It’s no time to kind of back up into the wall and panic. I do think they can find that quickly”. “We’ve got to have these”.
“It’s ugly right now”. There’s no nights off, and we get mad a lot when teams play well against us and the next night, they can’t make a shot, but that’s just how it is. Our rotations were great.
They needed a game where, by the middle of the third quarter, the biggest topic was if they should retire Free’s No. 21 and hang it from the rafters. Lue also thinks it to be insane since earlier in the season, James declared that he wanted to play this amount of minutes. “I’m not disappointed in the effort”. We know James has levels he can go in and out of, and there’s probably still one more he’s saving for the playoffs right now.
LeBron James says the reigning National Basketball Association champion Cleveland Cavaliers are “in a bad spot” after losing their third consecutive game, falling 99-93 Thursday, March 30 (Friday Manila time) at Chicago. “It’s all part of the process”. Our camaraderie didn’t. At the end of the day, we have to fix it and we’re here to fix it. “We don’t have a lot of time”. “I mentioned that since I’ve been back”. Tell me all you want about the ’96 Bulls, but that team lost sometimes. “I think timing more than anything”.
What’s more, as Tim Cato of SB Nation noted, it’s not just this March slump that has seen such a jarring difference in rating between when James sits and when he plays.
Cavs coach Tyronn Lue said the meeting would be meaningless if the Cavs didn’t play better, and they finally did just that, blowing the game open in the second quarter by outscoring the Sixers 38-23.
However, with his Cavs team struggling right now, LeBron James does need to play. A three-game homestand opens Friday.
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“He’s like mastered the timing”, Love said.
