CLEVELAND — No lead is safe.
It’s a tendency the Cavaliers carried into the postseason, no matter how much they’d like to swear it off.
It’s a byproduct of their collapse at Atlanta on April 9, when the Hawks trailed by 26 points to start the fourth quarter and won by one in overtime. The Hawks became only the third team in league history to overcome that margin in the final period and pull out a victory.
It nearly happened again Saturday in the Cavs’ 109-108 triumph over the Indiana Pacers in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference first-round series at Quicken Loans Arena.
The Cavs led by 12 points with 2:11 left in the third quarter after LeBron James’ running dunk sent the crowd into a frenzy and drew primal screams from James and Richard Jefferson. It felt as if that were the moment the Cavs’ playoffs really began, the moment that would set the tone for their defense of the NBA title.
With 9:06 remaining, the Cavs still led the Pacers by 10.
But the Cavs hit only 6-of-18 shots in the fourth quarter. Five of their 12 misses came within 5 feet of the basket, three by James, two by Kyrie Irving. With 3:31 to go, the Pacers had rallied to take a two-point lead on Jeff Teague’s 3-pointer.
Only C.J. Miles’ missed 14-foot jumper with one second left on a play during which Pacers’ four-time All-Star Paul George wanted the ball back saved the Cavs from another stunning collapse.
“I wouldn’t call it giving it away,” Jefferson said to a question about losing a 12-point lead. “No disrespect to the question about giving up the lead. They’re a great team and we’re going to have to battle for 48 minutes until that buzzer sounded, and tonight we did that.”
The Cavs might dispute the fact they are a team that lacks the killer instinct to hang onto a lead. But in nine of their 31 (29 percent) regular-season losses, they blew double-digit leads. Five of those came in 20 games since March 9. One of those was at Miami on April 10, when the Big Three sat out.
But it didn’t happen during February, when the Cavs compiled a league-best 9-2 mark.
James thought he knew what happened in the fourth quarter against the Pacers Saturday, but was anxious to study the film.
“Offensively we got a little stagnant, started playing a little isolation, which we’re very good at, but no matter what happened we came out with the win,” he said. “In a series you get better with time, you see what teams are capable of, what they want to do, what we want to do, how we can be successful on both ends. I’m looking forward to actually watching the film tomorrow to see how we can be much better going into Monday.”
Game 2 is at 7 p.m. tonight at the Q before the series shifts to Indianapolis for games Thursday and Sunday.
Finding the reason the Cavs can’t hold onto a lead is difficult. There may be more than one.
It could be a lack of focus or a heightened sense of self-worth once they get the lead. It could be a manifestation of their three-year flip-the-switch mentality. It could be inefficiencies of their 22nd-ranked defense. It could be age, with eight of the 15 players on the roster 31 or older.
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