Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen detail how Cavs can better fend off Scottie Barnes, Raptors

Story by

Spencer Davies, ClutchPoints

Sun, Apr 26, 2026 ·

5 min read

Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen detail how Cavs can better fend off Scottie Barnes, Raptors appeared first on ClutchPoints . Add ClutchPoints as a Preferred Source by clicking here .

After Scottie Barnes , RJ Barrett , Collin Murray-Boyles , and the Toronto Raptors lit up the Cleveland Cavaliers on Thursday, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen understand the assignment for Game 4. Not only do the Cavs have to play with force , but they also have to turn up the heat defensively.

“I think we have our coverages down. I think we have everything in terms of the X’s and O’s on point. But we are just a step behind,” Allen said after Saturday’s practice. “We’re letting them get ahead of us.”

“We’ve got to meet them early, not let them get into our paint as easy,” Mobley added. “They switched up some of the offense and some of the plays on how they were attacking, but I think we just had to be more active and more detail-oriented, and knowing what’s going on and attacking it with force. I think sometimes we knew what was going on, but we didn’t necessarily take the action we needed to make the plays that we needed to make.”

Barnes and Barrett scored 33 points each on an astounding 23-of-36 from the field, accounting for 16 assists, 11 made free throws, and nine triples. They shot the heck out of the ball and drove into Cleveland’s chest. It was essentially Toronto’s version of Game 2, when the Cavs’ trio of Mobley, Donovan Mitchell, and James Harden dominated from start to finish.

“Scottie got into the paint quite a bit. We can’t have that happen,” Allen said after Saturday’s practice. “I feel like he was dominant every single time he stuck his foot in the paint. RJ Barrett was incredible getting downhill. We just have to get a hit early and try to stop him from getting downhill.”

While Mobley tipped his cap to his 2021-22 Rookie of the Year rival , he knows he and the team can do more to make it difficult on Barnes.

“He kept getting downhill,” Mobley said. “I think he saw a few go through, and that made him confident. He had a home crowd behind him as well. And he just kept getting to his spots, and he felt comfortable. I feel like we’ve got to do a better job of just making him feel uncomfortable and not let him get to those spots and kind of make him think about what he wants to do.”

The Cavs are also incredibly aware of Murray-Boyles, who poured in 22 huge points off the bench and snagged eight rebounds, five of which were offensive. The Raptors’ energetic rookie has shown no signs of backing down and has a confident float game.

“You can look at it two ways,” Cleveland head coach Kenny Atkinson said. “[Either], ‘it’s analytics, [and] we’ll live with those. It’s 0.89 [points per possession].’ I’m like, no, this is the playoffs. We’ve got to contest that better. And they obviously shifted to go into ’em a little more. So we’ve got to firm up better, contest better, and then match their energy, right? That kid has got great energy. That’s part of the turn up your energy, turn up your force message.”

“You give credit where credit’s due,” Mobley said. “He’s playing very well right now. I mean, just making the little plays, whether it’s not on the stat sheet, offensive rebounding, setting good screens, rolling. I think we’ve got to pay a little bit more attention to him, but as a whole, we’re going to keep our scheme and look over the film and see what we’ve got to fix and adjust.”

Ultimately, Toronto played like a squad with the season on the line in Game 3, as expected. It was a hot shooting night for their core players and everybody else, knocking down 14-of-23 threes as a whole.

“I think contest level, KYP [know your personnel] is really important,” Atkinson said. “But, listen, at the end of the day, to me, it was too much rim, too much paint. That’s their strength. So, we have to do a better job on them invading our goal, more resistance early, because that’s rim, and now you get both, right? Everybody in this league is fighting for paint touches. We were too permissive, especially in that third and fourth quarter.”

Allen said the obvious focal point for the perimeter shooting, outside of Barrett and Barnes, is Jamison Battle . He’s a familiar foe that burned Cleveland multiple times in the regular season, and he hadn’t been in Toronto’s rotation until Thursday’s sharpshooting performance.

“A lot of things that happened, we just let it slip,” Allen said. “We were helping too much off of him, and we were late on a lot of the passes. I hate using the word, but it’s going to be force. Toronto played with a lot of force and we need to play with more. That helps with contesting a lot of shots…

“… Kudos to them. They hit a lot of shots. They played an amazing brand of basketball. But at the same time, we didn’t play our best game of basketball. I think that just compounded into the fourth quarter when the momentum got to it, the crowd got into it, and they just took off.”

There are areas for the Cavs’ defense to clean up in Game 4 and going forward in this series. It’s their first true test of the postseason.

“We’re positive now, but we understand that we got kicked in the butt,” Allen said. “We understand that there’s a lot of things we need to pick up. We’re high on ourselves, but we’re still taking this very seriously.

“It’s a very important game [Sunday]. This is what we’ve been doing all year, trying to respond to adversity, trying to respond to what’s been thrown at us previously. Just coming in and playing our game in basketball, not getting down on ourselves.”