And now our watch is ended

Why you should take a minute to reflect on the Cavs’ season

Depending on your mood, the soundtrack for this one is either the we-stink-and-we-stunk-all-year-and-even-if-we-were-healthy-we-wouldn’t-have-stood-a-chance How it Ends by DeVotchKa, or the hey-we-kinda-made-Boston-work-for-it Take a Minute by K’naan. Whichever song you pick, you probably won’t make the second chorus. I’ll be brief. 

The Cavs season is over. 

Fighting their tails off without Donovan Mitchell, Jarrett Allen, and Caris LeVert, the Wine and Gold were within three points of Boston in the fourth quarter on Wednesday. But the Celtics, as everyone rightly predicted, were just too talented for undermanned Cleveland. Impossibly peppy 37-year old Al Horford lit a fire under his teammates and Boston’s crowd and the Celtics pulled away to a 113-98 win. They advanced to the Eastern Conference finals to play the winner of New York and Indiana. The Cavs went home.  

And so now it’s the offseason.  

The Athletic’s Shams Charania waited about thirty seconds after Wednesday’s postgame press conference to publish a hit piece about the mood in Cleveland, scrambling the rumor jets in a hundred different directions about Donovan Mitchell’s future, Evan Mobley’s desire to be a Cavalier, frustrations with J.B. Bickerstaff, and so on. 

Ahhh the offseason. 

As exciting as playing general manager in your head can be, as click worthy as it is to pontificate about how widely-known-to-be-available-player-A would fit in Cleveland or what kind of draft capital Darius Garland might be worth if Mitchell re-signs, it’s not nearly as fun as having real basketball to watch and talk about. 

So before you decide to dive head first into the deep end of the trade machine or into the whirling fans of Bleacher Report’s chatter mill, I urge you to follow K’naan’s advice and take a minute to let it breathe. 

And when you do think of the Cavaliers, think not about whether J.B. should be fired or Evan and JA should be split up, but about Evan Mobley’s playoff emergence, about coming back from 18 down in game seven against Orlando, about Donovan Mitchell’s crossover three over Jason Tatum in game two, about Max Strus’s 57-foot buzzer beater against Dallas, about the Georges Niang game, or about how every time it felt like the Cavs could and probably should just give up–and there were lots of them–they bore down and kept going.

Plenty of franchise-altering questions loom over Cleveland, but we’ll be sick of talking about them by July. So enjoy some more playoff basketball while you can—sometimes it’s easier without any skin in the game. 

Cheers, and go anyone but Boston (sorry, friends).