CLEVELAND — The Cavaliers need to see it for themselves. They need to watch it in action.

Immediately after their first-round exit in last year's playoffs, the Cavs went to work to address the issues that became apparent against the New York Knicks.

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Max Strus and Georges Niang were brought in as shooters. The Cavs added depth to their interior. Evan Mobley added an in-home gym. Shooting and rebounding were the obvious focuses.

All of those factors seem to address those problems, but only on paper. They needed to be tested. They needed to see what they could learn from games against the Milwaukee Bucks, the Boston Celtics and so on.

There's only one way to find out if what they tried to put into motion actually gels the right way.

"We're like everybody, we've got to see it," Cavs coach J.B. Bickerstaff said earlier this season. "It's about consistency. It's too early for me to hump out of here and say, 'Hooray, we've done the job.' We have to show it to each other for the remainder of the season."

Except, they never really had the chance. Darius Garland and Evan Mobley are both sidelined for at least a month (and, especially in Mobley's case, likely two).

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It's hard to see something that isn't there for the time being. That's called faith, and while the Cavs have it, they'd prefer to take more of an evidence-based approach here.

Fast forward to Friday night. The Cavs welcomed the Bucks — a team that symbolizes the top tier of squads Cleveland hopes to join — for the first of four matchups in a span of four weeks. Except the Cavs will be without Mobley and Garland for all of them.

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A goal always exists to learn from marquee regular-season games like these. But, at best, the Cavs can only hope for an incomplete grade.

As the New Year arrives, and the Cavs turn the page to 2024, their goal remains the same: prove they can trade punches with the elite teams in the East, which on paper is led by the Bucks and Celtics.

It's the next jump in the Cavs' multi-year evolution. And it's the most difficult one to land.

"It's easy to talk about and say this is what we want to do and this is how we're going to do it, but you have to be realistic in how many things have to go your way in order to get there," Bickerstaff said recently. "And I think that's the thing about sustained success is every year you have to put yourself in position, which isn't always easy because you never know what's going to happen to the next team or the next jump that's around you."

But now, they must wait. The Cavs lost 119-111 to the Bucks Friday night, though it was a feat to be within striking distance in the game's final minutes considering the absences of Garland and Mobley. Three more games against the former champs will come in January alone.

"At some point in time, we're going to be healthy, and we're going to be a bear," Bickerstaff said. "We just got to continue to implement all the small things, go through adversity together [and] build trust."

When asked what can be learned from Friday night's game, considering the circumstances, Donovan Mitchell relayed he wasn't overly upset with how they played. It was a game in which some open 3s didn't fall, and the Cavs finished a season-worst 6 of 43 from deep.

"I like what we did tonight," Mitchell said. "I'm not really upset with a lot of what we did. … Sometimes that's the nature of the game."

The Cavs have three more chances to try to steal a win from the Bucks in the coming weeks. Even though it'd be an incomplete preview of a potential playoff matchup without Garland and Mobley, the Cavs can only hope to show that the pieces could all be there.

For now, they can only rally behind the adversity.

When asked about anyone leaving the Cavs for dead in the East, Bickerstaff replied, "I've never heard that and I don't pay attention to those people, so it doesn't matter to me."

Ryan Lewis can be reached at rlewis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ByRyanLewis.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Cleveland Cavaliers search for lessons in loss to Milwaukee Bucks