Being able to bounce back from terrible losses has allowed the Cleveland Cavaliers to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in eight years. They’ll need to do so again after they inexplicably blew a 22-point fourth-quarter lead and lost in overtime to the New York Knicks, 115-104, in Game 1.

“We lost, we f****** blew it,” Donovan Mitchell said afterward.

This terrible loss showed two things. Number one, the advantages that you thought the Cavs would have coming into this series proved true. And number two, this team struggles to counter in-game adjustments.

We’ll start with the positives, since those are easy to miss in a game defined by the final quarter.

The Cavs’ defense was up to the challenge.

Defense is the first thing that usually gets blamed when you blow a lead as large as the Cavs did. However, even in the Knicks’ fourth-quarter comeback, it was their inability to create offense that ultimately did them in far more than their defense.

Cleveland’s defense on Karl-Anthony Towns was excellent, especially when the Cavs had two bigs on the floor.

One of Towns’s best skills on offense is being able to pull the center out of the paint and then playmake from there. Having Evan Mobley providing on-ball pressure with Jarrett Allen off-ball at the rim short-circuited that process. This contributed to a few of his seven giveaways on the night.

Having Allen as the primary defender on Josh Hart paid off. The defense dared Hart to beat them off the dribble or with the three-ball. He wasn’t able to do so as he went 1-5 from three and finished with the worst plus/minus of anyone in Game 1 at -23.

Cheating off Hart can be risky because of what he can provide as an offensive rebounder. The Cavs did a good job of not losing track of him in these situations. Having two rim protectors, one to cheat off Hart and clog the paint, and one to guard Towns, worked perfectly

The Knicks weren’t able to generate many outside looks. The best way to defend the three-point line is to keep your opponent from getting those shots. The Cavs limited the Knicks to just 32 outside looks, which translated to a third of their shot attempts (24th percentile). That’s a win for a team that has been on fire from three throughout the postseason.

The Cavs were able to do so while still defending the rim. New York converted just 62.5% of their looks in the restricted area.

These are the signs of a good defensive process. It was their work on this end that led to their 22-point lead.

Offensively, Donovan Mitchell had much more space to operate compared to the previous two seasons. This allowed him to get to the paint more easily, especially during the second and third quarters when the Cavs were playing their best.

Cleveland’s bigs showed that they could be impactful in the paint. The guards didn’t feed them the ball as they should’ve, but when they did, good things happened.

Allen was impactful as an offensive rebounder. He grabbed six second-chance opportunities in a game that felt like it was going to be a reversal of the 2023 series.

The Cavs also generated clean three-point looks. The Knicks sell out more than nearly any other team to protect the basket. This is why they gave up the second-most threes in the league throughout the regular season.

Cleveland took nearly half of their shots from behind the arc. And while you don’t necessarily want to see Mobley attempt eight triples, most of the ones the Cavs did get were clean. The shot quality was good. The issue was that they only converted 32% of their looks. If they keep getting good shots, you’d expect that to turn around at some point.

Blowing a 22-point lead doesn’t come down to one thing. So many factors worked against the Cavs in the final eight minutes for them to give this away. But if you were forced to blame one thing, the offense’s inability to score down the stretch is what ultimately did them in.

The Cavs scored just 11 points in the final 13 minutes of regulation and overtime. The process went away, as they opted to bleed the clock instead of attacking whenever they saw an opening.

Basketball is a rhythm-based sport. If you halt your pace to waste time, you also take yourself out of the natural flow that allows you to perform your best. And then when you need to get back to it, as the Cavs did in overtime, it’s hard to find that again.

Mitchell and James Harden deserve the most blame for the offense falling apart in the fourth. They both failed to get the bigs involved, weren’t able to get downhill, and needlessly dribbled the air out of the ball.

The lack of aggressiveness from Mitchell was the most puzzling. He attempted just four shots in the fourth quarter, and mostly wasn’t a factor late.

Kenny Atkinson deserves blame for the collapse, most of all with how the team defended Jalen Brunson down the stretch.

New York hunted Harden defensively. They put him in 21 on-ball screens in the fourth quarter and overtime. This resulted in nine isolations, with the Knicks scoring 1.9 points per those possessions.

There’s no excuse for seeing that happen and not adjusting.

We know who Harden is as a defender. There are things that he can do well, given his size and strength. Hanging with a quicker guard like Brunson in isolation isn’t one of them.

If Harden is going to be targeted like that, he probably shouldn’t be on the court. But if you’re insistent on playing him for what he provides offensively, the game plan around him needs to be better.

It’s clear that the Cavs were willing to just give up the switch. Defenders weren’t fighting to stay with their assignment when the screen came. This strategy worked with Hart in the game; it didn’t when New York opted for shooting.

The Cavs weren’t prepared for a small-ball version of the Knicks.

Harden was able to be targeted because Landry Shamet (a shooter) was in place of Hart (not a shooter). If one of the bigs was able to roam off Hart, the paint still would’ve been clogged, and Brunson wouldn’t have been able to get going.

Not being prepared for this caused the Cavs to try to double these actions late, but it’s clear this wasn’t something they could execute. The double was more passive than anything, and the backside rotations weren’t where they needed to be for this to work.

This collapse was more a failure of preparation — which is understandable given the turnaround from Game 7 in Detroit — than anything else. The Cavs have the personnel to defend this better and have done so in the past.

You’d expect the Knicks to go with more five-out lineups in Game 2.

This game stings. You can’t afford to give away opportunities like this against an opponent as good as the Knicks and get away with it. At least not if you do so repeatedly.

That said, Game 1 doesn’t decide a series. And if it does, it wasn’t one that you were going to win anyway. The sky isn’t falling, at least not yet.

The Cavs have experience in these situations due to blowing multiple games already this postseason. They’ve responded well in each of those situations. They’ll need to do so again if they’re going to come back from a hole they dug completely on their own.

“It’s one game,” Mitchell said. “We could’ve lost by 40. It still would’ve been 1-0.”