What's Wrong With the Cleveland Cavaliers? Everything

The Cleveland Cavaliers are sinking. LeBron James is playing his fewest minutes per game at a near career low efficiency, meanwhile, his Cavaliers are fraught with infighting and look gummed up by ennui. But neither explanation--the mathematical nor the political--alone can capture what exactly has been at the core of Cleveland's rotten season. You need both to understand how soaked through to the bone Cleveland is.

The Cavs are 19-20, a game below the Bucks, who lost their future franchise savior to injury and are coached by a former mutineer. For a team that many predicted to win the championship, 19-20 is disastrous, but the manner in which they've shrugged to that mark is even worse. At this point in the season, the Cavs don't matter, they barely exist as a team worth talking about. The length of the season yet to play out feels more like a prison sentence than fertile ground for a resurgence.

The easy scapegoat is Kevin "6'10" in Shoes" Love. In Tuesday's loss to Phoenix, coach David Blatt pulled Love for the fourth quarter after he let Markieff Morris torch him repeatedly. The Cavaliers benefitted from it, even if a resurgent James couldn't keep them from losing. Love's Cavaliers problem is, in short, everything. Mostly, it's that he plays saloon door defense and, as a third banana, he doesn't get the post-up touches he thrived on in Minnesota.

It's not as if Love is all of a sudden a bad player (he is still a fringe All-Star despite the season his team is having), but he is a woeful fit with Cleveland and it's readily apparent. James wears a game-long scowl aimed at Love, while Love's countenance wobbles between wide-eyed terror and mentally checked out. With his shooting ability, Love makes sense as a floor-spreading spot-up shooter, but that would be a waste of his passing and rebounding, which the Cavs also need. Now that Anderson Varejao is hurt again, Love is needed in an uncomfortable role and it's not working.

But Love might not even be in North Ohio pushing a rock up a hill if not for the General Managering of LeBron James, which hints at the larger organizational fault lines within the Cavaliers. David Griffin is the GM who drafted Andrew Wiggins and nominally signs players, but James' fingerprints are all over the roster. When he came back to Cleveland, James brought his aging buddies Mike Miller and James Jones with him. He helped persuade Love to agree to re-sign with the Cavs and pushed the Love-Wiggins swap. LeBron pictures himself an auteur, the kind of player who can take over a game, sculpt a roster, and engineer a of play. In Miami, he had more input than the average player, but Erik Spoelstra was the undisputed coach of those teams and the Heat thrived under him.

The last time LeBron was on the Cavaliers, he had this degree of autonomy and it frustrated him to the point that he left. Coach Mike Brown was more or less in charge of the defense and keeping everybody happy, while James ran high pick-and-rolls on every play. Those Cavaliers never won a game in the Finals, despite two MVP seasons from James. They were also strangely unwatchable for a team starring an unprecedented talent.

It speaks to the opaque, passive aggressive mystery of LeBron James the human person that he has unprecedented authorship of his own basketball experience, yet it never seems to please him. When he's shooting eye-daggers at Kevin Love, an underachiever he had a hand in flipping the #1 pick for, it feels weird because Love is supposed to be his guy to some degree. If LeBron is getting what he wanted in the locker room and on the floor, why does he appear so unsatisfied? As the Cavs punch further and further below their weight, tensions will only strain more. Either LeBron James and the organization find common ground or they won't stand a chance of getting out of the East.

For all of Lebron's creakiness and slippage, the Cavs still have the talent to make a run at the Bulls, Hawks, Wizards, and Raptors. Unfortunately, all four teams will have the matchup advantage over Cleveland. Chicago and Washington are each stocked with eager, combative big men capable of overpowering Love and Tristan Thompson. Atlanta and Toronto shimmer, pass, and move better than any other teams in the East. Cleveland needs to improve, both on the court and behind closed doors.

It's telling that the Cavaliers' biggest problems are on defense. Defending at an elite or even passable level is a matter of chemistry and communication, neither of which the Cavs have. To fulfill their championship aspirations, they'll have to sew closed the gaps that currently define them. Given the recent pair of trades that put them clear of the salary cap, the roster is probably locked in place now, and Timofey Mozgov and J.R. Smith are nobody's messiahs. Whatever change filters through will have to come from within. At 30, LeBron James may not have the juice to carry a flawed team deep into the playoffs any more. If they are to deliver on their potential as contenders, it will take more than a one-man revival job, even if that one man is the best player of the past decade.