Dare to believe in the Cleveland Cavaliers

The Eastern Conference leading Cleveland Cavaliers appear to have rekindled their mojo. It was never far away, though consecutive home-and-away losses to the Atlanta Hawks provide a soup of illegitimacy as long as the Hawks remain the only team in the NBA to lose twice to the loathsome three-win Washington Wizards. The Cavaliers seem to have recovered from the wobble and it’s all normal basketball business in November and December, but suffice to say, the team bounced back from the best start in franchise history. It was inevitable. The questions had to do with how far their form would drop – are they as capable of brooding lows as they are of sublime highs – and exactly where they would sit in the league hierarchy once they had settled.

It’s possibly the most assured and elusive basketball blog post ever written about a team with just four losses a third of the way through an NBA regular season. Part of it, I swear, is an attempt to contain my own excitement about this Cavaliers team. I find them very easy to like, despite the few minutes each game that Donovan Mitchell spends waving his personal stamp around like a crazy postal clerk. On Monday night, they beat the absolute hell out of the Brooklyn Nets, rallied from a quick opening deficit with a vicious 16–0 run and then proceeded to treat the final 39 minutes or so of a 48-minute contest as an exhibition. Cleveland’s scoring efficiency was downright unreasonable: The four starters not named Donovan Mitchell combined for 56 points and missed just five total shots and one free throw between them. Caris LeVert and Georges Niang drilled 8-of-14 three-point attempts off the bench. Without anyone having an outstanding performance at all, the Cavs put up 130 points, and only Darius Garland’s uncharacteristically kicking the ball around and Sam Merrill’s forgetting how to shoot kept them from sniffing 150.

Their team-wide powers to stand in the right place all the time are formidable. The Cavaliers are the best three-point shooting team in the NBA by accuracybut this is not a five-out bomber-away offense. They prefer to take on the opposition: The Cavs are third in the NBA in drives per game, and lead the league in shooting efficiency on drives. There is sometimes a batshit quality to Mitchell and Garland’s determination to dribble into the paint, and they do a truly striking amount of back riffling when the mood strikes, but it’s easy to understand their sense of creative freedom and the latitude they’ expanded given the exact location of their supporting teammates, like floor spacers and outlet valves. LeVert, who is also happiest going downhill, takes advantage of the same distance; even small and relatively bagless Ty Jerome is allowed to shake and bake. There is somehow always a Niang or a Merrill or a Dean Wade passing away on one side of the floor and Jarrett Allen or Evan Mobley lurking for a dump-off on the other.

If the Cavs aren’t quite the buzzsaw they were through most of November, they’re still a buzzsaw. They are second in the NBA in points per game. possession, per Cleaning the glassonly behind the monstrous Celtics, who attempt a fun 12 more three-pointers per match. This difference in styles is part of what makes the Cavaliers so welcome as a sudden contender: While Boston is out there doing cold math with even less joy than is expressed by a graphing calculator, Cleveland appears more directly involved in a contest. Their three-point volume isn’t that predetermined: Instead, it’s predetermined that they’re going to bust someone’s ass with crafty ball-handling, and the stuff that happens next will flow from any crack that opens. Sometimes – very often, in fact – this will be a whip pass to the corner from the weak side for a Wade catch-and-shoot three-pointer. But Cleveland’s guards aren’t just trying to look for help: If a defense can’t produce a convincing deterrent, Mitchell’s preference is to make them feel dumb and small with a big dunk.

Cleveland’s defense has slipped. Their lead guards can be exploited and several of their gaps have heavy feet, no matter how pure their intentions. It’s a funny thing to say about a team that started its ascent a few years back with a rotation made up mostly of centers, but the Cavaliers could use another reliable big guy. On the other hand, Allen and Mobley are incredible defenders, and the team can only slide so far while both are healthy.

Mobley in particular has begun to see the code for the Matrix in real time. What I’m about to describe doesn’t show up easily in highlights, but please bear with me. A responsible NBA help defender gets to the right spot on the floor early. A few times Monday night, the Nets’ Cameron Johnson exemplified this behavior, a very Shane Battier-esque ability to stand at the end of a ballhandler’s vector with his feet rooted and his hands either straight up in the air or covering his bid. cock and balls, with enough time to make himself a physical barrier. I’m sure coaches love this; I’m sure it’s the thing they most dream of successfully drilling into each and every one of their players.

Mobley can do this, and in the first three seasons of his NBA career, he did it all the time because he is a good hoops citizen. But there is a way a defender can be that is only available to players with his specific blend of physical tools and defensive instincts. Mobley is still on time, but he’s learned that it’s a mere mortal thing to use their bodies to stop an opponent from getting to the basket. Instead of arriving early at a point that intercepts an opponent’s path to the basket, Mobley looms right next to the path, long and dangerous, like the Slenderman suddenly standing up in the brush along your jogging route. His positioning tells an opponent they can take a difficult shot, well, go for it, by all means, be a hero, while also filling up potential passing angles with his lanky and too quick limbs.

Spend a night watching Mobley move around the defense, and a funny thing will happen: For the first few minutes, you’ll cringe as he seems to fail to fully commit as a helper, and then it starts to make sense, and then at end of the game, you’ll have remembered that he arrived in the NBA with comparisons to Kevin Garnett, and you’ll stroke your chin and feel like maybe those comparisons weren’t so weird after all. The Cavaliers are better by more than nine points per 100 possessions on defense when Mobley is on the field; when he’s off the court, they defend about as well as the Charlotte Hornets, who stink and are forever doomed to the land of the rogue.

It’s silly, but I can’t tell if I’m under or overestimating the Cavaliers. They’re great to watch, and the barf-tacular East badly needs their darkhorse excellence, if only so the Celtics are forced to at least pretend to sit up and pay attention. But the season is still only a third of the way through, the Cavaliers haven’t performed too impressively in the playoffs with this core, and we’ve seen Mitchell-led teams look unbeatable in the regular season without ever establishing the kind of routine seriousness it requires to make a deep playoff push. I’ll choose optimism, I think: Kenny Atkinson has fresh ideas, Cleveland’s guys are among the best in the business at tactical position, and Evan Mobley is developing into a win button. Consider them legal until proven otherwise.