Something LeBron did a lot of during Game 5 was standing on the wing or in the corner, just looking uninterested.  I was sitting there waiting for LeBron to make a cut off the basketball, get the ball going full speed, and slamming it home.  After seeing the ball go in, LeBron would start making jumpers and the Cavs would come back and get the win.  That never happened though, LeBron just continued to stand there.

Kelly Dwyer just put out a fantastic article on what LeBron needs to do in Game 6, what I want to look at is what the Cavs can do to get LeBron going.  In my opinion, it’s all in the playcalling.

Pick and Roll As A Decoy

While watching game 5, I was so shocked that the Cavs didn’t call this play.  I was waiting for it and waiting for it, but it never happened.  That’s funny, because the Cavs seem to run this play once or twice a game and it seems to always work:

The way LeBron was just standing around during Game 5, this play would have worked and probably would have gotten LeBron going with a big dunk (especially when they needed a run in the third quarter).  What was Mike Brown doing not calling this play?  I have no idea.

Pick And Roll With LeBron as the screener

The Cavs don’t do this a ton (according to Synergy he was the roll man 1.1% – or 25 times – of the time he was on the offensive end), but it is something that can work and get LeBron going.  In fact, according to Synergy it produces 1.04 points per possession (this is better than his numbers working out of ISO sets).

It is really hard to defend this because your natural reaction is to hedge and worry about the guy coming off of the screen, but here you want to make sure the roll man (LeBron) doesn’t get free.  It isn’t natural for the defense, and they can get mixed up.

After a few pick and rolls with LeBron being the screen man, he then can slip the screen as the defense is waiting for the pick to be set.