NEW YORK — You can try to get the ball out of an elite scorer’s hands, show them different coverages and attack them on the other end. Game-planning for a jack-of-all-trades role player like Josh Hart, however, is tricky.
“I think what he does at an elite level is he impacts winning,” Cleveland Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff said on Sunday morning at Madison Square Garden, shortly before a first-round matinee against the New York Knicks.
Hart has a way of figuring out how to help his team, Bickerstaff said: “Some nights it’s taking charges, some nights it’s making shots.” The Cavaliers need to “understand where he hurts you the most” and act accordingly: Put a body on him so he can’t get offensive rebounds; take care of the ball and get back in transition because he’s always trying to push it.
No one can stop a player like Hart from bringing his intangibles to the party, but Bickerstaff wanted his team to “keep him out of the stat sheet” in Game 4.
That didn’t happen. Hart finished with 18 points, seven rebounds, two assists and two steals in 39 minutes, and his fingerprints were all over Donovan Mitchell’s 5-for-18 showing. About halfway through the fourth quarter, he grabbed a defensive rebound, then went coast to coast and finished over Jarrett Allen Minutes later, he bailed out a frenzied possession by hitting a turnaround flip shot just before the shot clock expired.Then he grabbed an offensive board and found Jalen Brunson open for a 3.
“What can you say about Josh Hart?” New York coach Tom Thibodeau said after the 102-93 win. “Again, it’s one tough play after the next. A big shot, big offensive rebound, great defense. The guy, he’s just a winner.”
Hart, acquired by the Knicks in February in a trade with Portland, isn’t the reason why New York has a 3-1 lead in the series. But imagine if it were the Cavs who traded for him.
In Cleveland’s three losses, it has had an offensive rating of 102.1, 84.0 and, on Sunday, 103.3 points per 100 possessions, which is to say that it has been significantly less efficient in this series than any team was in the regular season. After a Game 3 defeat in which the Cavs became the first team to score fewer than 80 points in a game this season, Bickerstaff stressed the importance of ball movement and getting to the second side. Far too many times in Game 4, Cleveland got stagnant again.
Mitchell put all the blame on…
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