PHOENIX -- It was a great night for Kyrie Irving on Monday. It was only a so-so night for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Irving scored the Cavs’ final seven points in the last three minutes -- finishing out a game for the first time out of the four he has played since making his comeback from surgery to repair a fractured left kneecap -- to help Cleveland to a 101-97 win over the Phoenix Suns.
Having Irving reach that level again -- he finished with 22 points in 24 minutes -- was a sight for sore eyes. He punctuated the performance with a 3-pointer with 21 seconds left that iced the game, letting it fly with two-tenths of a second on the shot clock to put the Cavs up by four.
“Great feeling having the kid back, you know,” LeBron James said of Irving. “He does so much for our team, creates another threat on our floor, and obviously a big shot he made.”
Yet some of the cheeriness that could’ve surrounded Irving’s night was couched by Cleveland’s overall showing as a team.
The Cavs gave up 30 first-quarter points to a Suns squad in complete disarray that has one star player, Markieff Morris, suspended for throwing a towel at the head coach; another star player, Eric Bledsoe, about to go under the knife for meniscus surgery this week, and a coaching staff that was cut down and reshuffled over the weekend after Phoenix’s owner and general manager met with every player on the roster for their input.
Furthermore, Irving’s heroics came in the midst of the Cavs' eight-point lead with 4 minutes, 36 seconds remaining in the fourth being cut all the way down to one with 1:28 to go against a Phoenix team that came into the night 5-15 in its past 20 games.
“I think we had some good moments, we had some bad moments,” James admitted.
On the good side, Cavs coach David Blatt’s decision to put Tristan Thompson in the starting lineup in place of Timofey Mozgov paid off in the sense that Cleveland won to snap its two-game skid and Thompson was reasonably effective (five points and 10 rebounds in 32 minutes) in his expanded role.
“Potentially for a while,” Blatt said when asked how permanent the lineup swap will be. “I don’t see it happening forever. But potentially.”
Also in the plus column was the fact that Cleveland made strides on offense, shooting better from 3-point territory (17-for-41 for 41.5 percent) that it had from the floor overall in any of its past three games, when it shot sub-40 percent against New York, Golden State and Portland.
But in adding up the bad stuff, not only was it a far-from-dominant effort against a downtrodden opponent, but Cleveland simply is not in sync the way most teams with championship aspirations would want to be nearly 30 games into the season.
It was a less-than inspiring night from James, as he finished with 14 points, seven assists, four rebounds, two steals and a block. His numbers weren’t as troubling as his body language, which vacillated between disinterested and upset for most of the night -- getting into a couple of brief back-and-forth spats with teammates over failed defensive execution.
The game also saw pretty much a completely new rotation out of Blatt, who not only started Thompson, but played 10 players anywhere from 13 to 35 minutes. While it gave those players a chance to do something in the time allotted, it also meant that Mo Williams, Anderson Varejao and Jared Cunningham were cut out of the rotation completely, all receiving DNP-CDs.
“I thought we were pretty generous with the minutes that we gave those 10 guys and I thought we got a return on them,” Blatt said.
That return was a win, but also a disjointed night. Even Irving’s big 3 was sullied ever so slightly by the fact that he nearly threw the ball out of bounds at the beginning of the possession. J.R. Smith made a great play on the ball to save it and pass it out to Kevin Love, who then tossed it over to Irving for the shot.
Yet, maybe it was just one of those survive-and-advance type of nights that come up on the NBA schedule. There was no profound breakthrough or letdown, just an incremental accomplishment for a star on the mend and a continuation of the process the Cavs have been through for months to try to recapture that magic cohesiveness that carried them through the second half of last season.
“Guys, we won the game,” veteran James Jones quipped to a couple of reporters before exiting the locker room for the night. “That should be the only thing that matters.”