The Eastern Conference-leading Cleveland Cavaliers appear to have refreshed their mojo. It was never far gone, although consecutive home-and-away losses to the Atlanta Hawks confer a soupçon of illegitimacy so long as the Hawks remain the only team in the NBA to have lost twice to the abominable three-win Washington Wizards. The Cavaliers appear to have recovered from the wobble, and this is all normal basketball business in November and December, but it's enough to say that the team regressed after the best start in franchise history. That was inevitable. The questions had to do with how far their form would dip—are they as capable of excruciating lows as they are of rarified highs—and where precisely they'd sit in the league hierarchy once they'd settled.
That is possibly the most hedged and evasive basketblog lede ever written about a team with just four losses a third of the way through an NBA regular season. Part of that, I swear, is an effort to contain my own excitement about this Cavaliers team. I find them very easy to like, notwithstanding the few minutes every game that Donovan Mitchell spends waving his personal stamp around like a crazed mail clerk. Monday night they beat the absolute hell out of the Brooklyn Nets, recovering from a quick opening deficit with a vicious 16–0 run and then pouring it on, so that the final 39 minutes or so of a 48-minute contest were treated like 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 even having a standout performance, the Cavs breezed to 130 points, and only Darius Garland kicking the ball around uncharacteristically and Sam Merrill forgetting how to shoot prevented them from sniffing 150.
Their team-wide powers of standing in the right place all the time are formidable. The Cavaliers are the best three-point shooting team in the NBA by accuracy, but this is not a five-out bombs-away offense. They prefer to gut 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 the determination of Mitchell and Garland to dribble into the paint, and they do a really striking amount of bag-riffling when the vibe hits, but it's easy to understand their sense of creative freedom and the latitude they're extended given the exact positioning of their supporting teammates, as floor spacers and outlet valves. LeVert, also happiest going downhill, exploits the same spacing; even diminutive and relatively bagless Ty Jerome is allowed to shake and bake. There is somehow always a Niang or a Merrill or a Dean Wade one pass 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 are still a buzzsaw. They're second in the NBA in points per possession, per Cleaning the Glass, behind only the outrageous Celtics, who attempt a hilarious 12 three-pointers more per game. That difference of 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 engaged in a competition. Their three-point volume isn't so predetermined: Instead, what is predetermined is that they will Bust Someone's Ass with crafty ball-handling, and the things that happen next will flow from whatever fissure is opened. Sometimes—very often, in fact—this will be a whipped pass to the weak-side corner for a Wade catch-and-shoot three-pointer. But Cleveland's guards aren't merely probing to draw help: If a defense can't muster up a convincing deterrent, Mitchell's preference is to make them feel stupid and small, with a large dunk.
Cleveland's defense has slipped. Their lead guards are exploitable, and several of their spacing guys have heavy feet, however pure their intentions. It's a funny thing to say about a squad 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 of them are healthy.
Mobley in particular is beginning to see the code of the Matrix in realtime. The thing I am about to describe doesn't show up very 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, Cameron Johnson of the Nets exemplified this behavior, a very Shane Battier-esque ability to stand at the end of a ball-handler's vector with his feet rooted and his hands either straight up in the air or covering his tender dick and balls, with enough time to make himself into a physical barrier. I'm sure coaches love this; I'm sure it's the thing they most dream about drilling successfully into every one of their players.
Mobley can do this, and across 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 that a defender can be that is only available to players with his specific mix of physical tools and defensive instincts. Mobley is still on time, but he has learned that it falls to mere mortals to use their bodies to stop one opposing player from making it to the basket. Instead of arriving early to a point that intercepts an opponent's path to the basket, Mobley looms just off that path, long and dangerous, like Slenderman standing up suddenly in the brush alongside your jogging route. His positioning tells an opponent that they can take a difficult shot, yes, go for it, by all means, be a hero, while also filling up potential passing angles with his spindly and too-quick limbs.
Spend a night watching Mobley move around on defense, and a funny thing will happen: For the first few minutes you will flinch as he seems to fail to fully commit as a helper, and then it will start to make sense, and then by the end of the game you will have remembered that he arrived in the NBA with comparisons to Kevin Garnett, and you will be stroking your chin and feeling like maybe those comparisons weren't so outlandish after all. The Cavaliers are better by more than nine points per 100 possessions on defense when Mobley is on the court; when he is off the court, they defend about as well as the Charlotte Hornets, who stink and are condemned for all time to the land of the unserious.
This is stupid, but I can't tell if I'm underrating or overrating 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 over, 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 routinized seriousness it takes to make a deep playoff push. I'm going to choose optimism, I think: Kenny Atkinson has fresh ideas, Cleveland's guys are among the best in the business at tactical standing, and Evan Mobley is evolving into a win button. Consider them legit until proven otherwise.
