CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cavs are 23 games into the season, and the disturbing truth is emerging on the Wine and Gold Talk podcast: what we’re seeing might not be a slump. It might be who they are.

Following the Cavs’ disappointing 122-110 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, cleveland.com beat reporter Chris Fedor didn’t hold his tongue about what’s becoming increasingly clear about this team’s identity — or lack thereof.

“They’re not looking like a championship level team, this version of the Cavs,” Fedor stated bluntly on the podcast. “They do have flaws. And I think other teams around the NBA have done a really, really good job exposing the Cavs’ flaws.”

What’s most concerning isn’t just that the Cavs are losing games they should win. It’s that the same problems keep surfacing night after night.

Against Portland, a team that entered the game as one of the worst shooting teams in the league, the Cavaliers were outshot, outrebounded, and outworked in nearly every statistical category.

“The hard thing is that performances like tonight against Portland, they’re not becoming the outlier, right? They’re not becoming the expectation, they’re becoming the norm,” Fedor explained. “It’s kind of who the Cavs are and it’s a dangerous precedent.”

Perhaps most troubling is Cleveland’s inability to impose their will on opponents.

Last season, despite their playoff shortcomings, the Cavs at least had a clear sense of who they were during the regular season. This year’s team appears lost.

Fedor elaborated: “They are not capable of consistently dictating terms to the opponent. It feels like more times than not the game is played on somebody else’s terms … They don’t have their, their ability to impose their will and impose their identity because I don’t think they know who they are still. I don’t think they have an identity, a clear-cut identity.”

This identity crisis is particularly evident in the team’s inconsistency. Or rather, their consistency in making the same mistakes repeatedly.

“I think there is a level of consistency that they’re showing and it’s like these flaws continue to show up over and over and over again,” Fedor pointed out. “And when you see it repeatedly, you start to ask yourself, okay, is this just who the team is? Do I have to reset my expectations?”

For a team with championship aspirations, this kind of soul-searching shouldn’t be happening a quarter of the way into the season.

With losses in four of their last five games at the time of recording, the Cavs have slid to seventh in the Eastern Conference — which would place them in the play-in tournament if the season ended today.

While injuries to key players like Jarrett Allen, Sam Merrill, and Max Strus provide some context, they don’t fully explain why the Cavs are being outplayed in hustle, hunger, and execution by teams with far less talent.

As the Wine and Gold Talk podcast reveals, that a few bad games is different from whether this team has the foundation to be who they claim they want to be.

Want to hear the full, fiery breakdown of the Cavs’ identity crisis? Listen to the complete episode of the Wine and Gold Talk podcast as Fedor and host Ethan Sands dig deep into what’s really happening with this underperforming Cavaliers team.

Here’s the podcast for this week: