The NBA regular season is days from wrapping up. The once white-hot Cleveland Cavaliers have still yet to officially clinch a spot in the NBA playoffs. Currently, the Cavaliers sit at 47-33 and are the 4 seed in the Eastern Conference. Yet Cavs fans are very much not confident in the team as they have a record of 8-12 over their last 20 games. I, like many others, attribute this less-than-stellar play to many different factors.

The main factor in my mind that has caused poor performance is the injury bug that has been running around Cleveland dating back to the Browns season. Key players such as Donovan Mitchell, Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, Max Strus, and Dean Wade have all missed multiple games due to being injured. Another factor attributing to poor performance is the rotations the coaching staff has put together. Strus and Mitchell played in 80% of the first 32 minutes against the Phoenix Suns just weeks after returning from respective knee injuries. Players like Craig Porter, Sam Merril, and Marcus Morris Sr. can contribute meaningful minutes as we have seen when the roster is depleted with injuries. Why not play these players to help ease the workload on players (like Mitchell) who don’t look like themselves 100% after returning from injury? I see why the fan base is frustrated as the Cavaliers looked to be a front-runner in the east before the all-star break.

This is all said to give perspective on the state of the fan base leading into the NBA playoffs. With an important game against the Indiana Pacers set to take place tonight at the time of this writing, I would like to give some positives to lighten up the spirits of my fellow Cleveland sports fans. The biggest positive in my mind is that all injured players but Dean Wade are back from injury, and more importantly, Donovan Mitchell has continued to look more like himself since removing the face mask to protect his nose. As previously mentioned, we have seen this team have chemistry before the all-star break, so why can’t they when the lights are brightest in the NBA playoffs? Let’s use these last two games in the regular season to get this right. We have truly all but clinched, though not officially as the title states, so I view the Pacers and Hornets games as a way for this team to get on the same page and make some noise in the NBA playoffs. Lastly, it seems our first-round match-up in the playoffs will either be against the Magic or the Pacers, two teams I truly think we can beat in a 7-game series.

I love Cleveland’s fan base for all 3 of our major sports teams. However, we also can be very negative at times, and this Cavaliers season is another example of that. Cleveland, this season is not over yet! We have playoff basketball to look forward to, and I, for one, am not ready to throw in the towel on what has been a mostly fun season of basketball despite all the negatives. Let’s adopt the ‘why not us’ mentality we had with the Browns when we clinched the playoffs last season and cheer the Cavaliers as deep into the playoffs as they take us.