A no-highlight night at Quicken Loans Arena

As ugly as Cleveland’s 84-76 win was, the Cavs may have gotten better.

GATEHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

CLEVELAND — Cross off game No. 80 on the Cavaliers’ schedule — a lackluster night of basketball Sunday that actually helped them move closer to their goal.

The Cavs beat the hapless Miami Heat, 84-76, in front of an announced sellout crowd of 20,562 at Quicken Loans Arena. Cleveland struggled for three-plus quarters against the league’s worst team before putting away the Heat.

“It felt like an end of the season type of game,” Cavs point guard Delonte West.

When it was over, the two head coaches needed less than two minutes combined to analyze the night’s events. Their highlights:

“We just couldn’t make enough shots. Same old story,” said Miami’s Pat Riley.

“Both teams obviously missed a lot of shots,” said Cleveland’s Mike Brown.

“For us to out rebound them by 20 ... we were active on the glass and limiting them to four offensive rebounds was huge.”

Their teams didn’t give them a lot to discuss.

No one scored 20 points individually. Both teams shot below 40 percent from the floor.

West scored a game-high 18 points, while Zydrunas Ilgauskas added 14 points and 14 rebounds for the Cavs.

But as ugly as the game was, LeBron James thought the Cavs (44-36) got better.

“I think that defensively, we were really good,” said James, whose 13 points on 3-for-9 shooting equaled his second-lowest output of the season.

“Offensively, we couldn’t make shots. But I can live with us if we played defense liked we did tonight. We contested and we helped each other on the defensive end.”

Yes, this was an improvement over Friday’s loss at Chicago where the Bulls dunked at will on the Cavs during parts of the second half.

But these are the injury-ravaged Heat (14-66), who have beaten just three teams currently with a winning record (Houston, Utah and Phoenix) and all of those happened before Christmas. And since shutting down injured All-Star Dwyane Wade after a March 8 loss, have only beaten fellow draft lottery participants Milwaukee (twice) and Chicago. But come to think of it, the Cavs can’t seem to beat those two teams, either, so the Cavs won’t get picky about how they win.

“I don’t know what it was,” West said. “But at the end of the day, we got a ‘W’ that’s all we’re taking from it. We did what we’re supposed to.”

With a win tonight in Philadelphia, the Cavs can lock up the fourth seed in the playoffs and homecourt advantage for the first round. They will play the Wizards, who are two games behind them in the standings.

The Cavs and Heat are the Eastern Conference’s past two champions, though, it was hard to tell Sunday. When Miami’s Joel Anthony sent a second-quarter free throw crashing off the backboard, wide left of the rim by several inches, it summed up the entire first half.