Cavs vs. Pacers preview and game thread
The bench will look to bounce back from a rough showing in their first preseason outing.
The Cavs dropped their first preseason game to the Chicago Bulls. They’ll try to improve on that performance on Thursday.
Who: Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Indiana Pacers
Where: Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse - Cleveland, OH
When: 7 p.m., Thursday Oct. 10
TV: Bally Sports Ohio, NBA League Pass
Spread: Cavs -2
What to watch for
Playing against someone with a different style
Bulls head coach Billy Donovan said that one of his main goals of preseason was to simply play against a team that’s different than your own.
“You’re trying to play against someone other than yourself so that things that you’re trying to work on getting better at get exposed,” Donovan said before Tuesday’s game in Cleveland.
The Cavs will get that with the Pacers. Indiana’s run-and-gun style has proven to be difficult for Cleveland in recent years. The pace and space they play with is tough to stay up with for a team that’s been better at locking down the paint than they are the perimeter. That’s beneficial in this setting.
Kenny Atkinson has mentioned throughout training camp that this is still a defensive first team. They’ve spent much of camp making sure it stays that way even though they aren’t changing things up defensively. This game should provide a nice test to find how they stack up on that end.
Can Evan Mobley carry over that aggression?
Mobley was great on Tuesday. He was everything he and his teammates have wanted to see. The question now is whether he can repeat that performance.
Seeing flashes of good play hasn’t been an issue. Keeping it up over multiple weeks has been. This game won’t prove anything definitive, but you would like to see him continue to stack good performances together.
Filling out the rotation
The bench wasn’t great against Chicago. Atkinson decided to go with five-men line changes that left the reserves playing with other bench players. That’s not how they’ll be used in the regular season and it doesn’t set them up for success.
Still, you’d like to see better performances from guys like Georges Niang, Ty Jerome, Sam Merrill, and Craig Porter Jr. who are fighting to be a part of the rotation. We’ll see if any of those players can have a bounce-back showing.