Game Night Observations: A Fourth Quarter Cavalanche, Letting Go of Last Year and Nae'Qwan Tomlin's Impact

The Cavs have had better wins than this one, but they all go into the same column in the standings.

CLEVELAND — It wasn’t always pretty, but the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Memphis Grizzlies 108-100 on Saturday night to move to 9-5 on the season.

For the first three quarters, the Cavs looked stuck in mud offensively, as head coach Kenny Atkinson described it. The brand of basketball that is expected from the Cavs was absent, again. The team struggled to find footing and was unable to take control of the game at any point. They hadn’t scored more than 30 points in any of the first three quarters and weren’t playing with enough force.

Then, the fourth quarter arrived and the script flipped.

In the final 12 minutes, the Cavs looked like the Cavs. They held Memphis to just 16 points while making the big plays that had alluded them for the first 36 minutes of the night.

“I felt like we were stuck in mud again for three quarters,” Atkinson said. “We could not get it below, like, it was like nine, seven, nine. We couldn’t get on a sustained run until the fourth quarter.”