Tweet of the Night: Without comment, Bill Simmons posts a clip of LeBron James’ commercial from October

The Cleveland Cavaliers are not playing like the team many expected them to be (sound familiar?), and it has been causing all sorts of unnecessary drama over the past week or so.

It all kind of started when LeBron James stated he was “in chill mode” during a contest against the Orlando Magic, which he said was “deactivated” when Tobias Harris riled him up. Although James clarified those comments on Tuesday by stating “it had nothing to do with me not playing hard”, it sure looked as though he was giving less than 100 percent through much of the first half of that contest.

In that same contest, Kevin Love was benched in the fourth quarter due to matchups. He cheered on his team like a good trooper on the bench, but the situation was rather peculiar. He is a max-level player and is supposed to join the team when they go on a run instead of sitting out an entire quarter because clearly, the coach didn’t trust that his team could sustain the lead/flow if he came back into the game. Mind you, this was a game where the Cavaliers could have used all the talent they could on the floor, given Kyrie Irving’s absence due to a knee injury. Why would Love, an unrestricted free agent, want to come back next year if this is how they’re going to treat him?

Then came this story about James’ willingness to leave Cleveland again if things don’t look to pan out. Whether there’s any truth to the report or not, James would be borderline crazy to leave the city again after making such a glorious comeback. For whatever reason, though, he simply has not been the same player that we’ve grown accustomed to over the years.

James started the year in horrendous fashion against the lowly New York Knicks, shooting just five-of-15 from the field for 17 points, five rebounds, four assists and a whopping eight turnovers to suffer an inexplicable 95-90 loss. His play has picked up since then, but is still shooting 48.8 percent from the field – well below the 56 percent range he has been in over the past couple of years – and his PER of 25 is the lowest since the 2006-2007 season when he was just 22. There isn’t a real explanation for the drop in level of play, but he clearly has not been himself through more than a quarter of the season, especially on the defensive end of the floor.

Bill Simmons posted a clip of a commercial from October that shows James saying to his teammates that they have to “give everything they’ve got” because they “owe it to the city”, along with other motivating words.