Too Cavalier?
The Cavs have underwhelmed in this postseason, but after a big Game 6 win in Detroit, might they still pose a threat to the Knicks?
Good morning!
Full disclosure: I wrote the below piece on the Cleveland Cavaliers yesterday morning and afternoon, well before last night’s Game 5 win over the Pistons. Sometimes that can be extremely dangerous, because you never know when the events of one game can change what we think about a team, and thus, how they’re discussed.
Considering the Cavs won a key road game last night and the below newsletter doesn’t exactly paint them in the best light, you’d normally assume I’d have a problem. Not quite. In three plus decades of watching NBA basketball, I’ve never seen a less impressive Game 5 victory in a 2-2 series. The Cavs made (checks notes) zero field goals in the first 7:24 of the fourth quarter as Detroit took a nine-point lead, only to choke it away in the final minutes, only for the Cavs to botch the final play of regulation and then try multiple times to give the game away in overtime, only for the Pistons to vociferously respond “no, you take it!” like a host trying to unload extra dessert on their guests after a dinner party. I’m having a lot of trouble taking either of these teams seriously after that game (although Max Strus is a dawg), and everything I wrote below still stands.
Too Cavalier?
At the risk of tempting the fates and upsetting the basketball gods, I’ll open today’s discussion of the Cavs by asking a simple question:
Has there been a more underwhelming playoff team in the last four years than Cleveland?
I’ll preface the discussion by pointing out that the only teams who qualify for this title are ones who reach great heights in the regular season, and the Cavaliers certainly meet that bar. They are third in the NBA in wins over this span, trailing the Celtics and Thunder and sitting one win clear of the Nuggets. Those three teams, of course, have all won titles in the length of time we’re talking about.
Fifth and sixth on the list are the Knicks and Wolves, respectively, both of whom have made two conference finals (with hope still alive for Minnesota to make a third) and have multiple signature playoff series victories on their resume.
Cleveland, meanwhile, is still looking for their first. They have three first round wins, but none have been impressive. They needed seven games to beat a young Magic team in 2024, then mopped up the 37-win Heat in 2025, and then needed another seven games to eliminate the injury-riddled, happy-to-be-there Raptors two weeks ago. Those wins are vastly overshadowed by the losses, all of which have been meek five-game exits. None were more disappointing than last year, when a 64-win juggernaut got steamrolled by the eventual East champion Pacers. They became just the fourth team ever (out of 28) to win that many games and fail to make the conference finals1.
That all of this has come after they won the Donovan Mitchell sweepstakes is either a reflection on Mitchell himself, an indictment on the organization as a whole, or both. The fact that the loser of that sweepstakes was the first team to vanquish this version of the Cavs and may now be standing in their way once again is only fitting.
In fairness, the question of “are we sure the Knicks are better off not getting Donovan Mitchell?” lingered for quite some time after the summer of 2022 (has it really been that long?) and in theory could still resurface depending on what happens over the next two weeks. For the moment though, the book on pairing Mitchell with a traditional point guard has been one that starts like gangbusters but can’t quite stick the landing. With both Darius Garland and now James Harden, there has been beautiful regular season basketball but also a devolution into “your turn / my turn” monotony during the playoffs.
Perhaps that’s unfair given a) Garland’s injury issues over the last two postseasons and b) the fact that the Mitchell/Harden combo has been quite effective during these playoffs, carrying a positive 6.7 net rating going into last night. Still, their like sizes make switching actions a no brainer, thus making Mitchell-plus-point guard lineups simpler to defend, if not always easier. Between that and the fact that Spida does his best work on the ball and hasn’t evolved much as a passer (2.9 assists per game in the postseason going into last night), the Cavs haven’t exactly disproved the notion that building a team around two ball-dominant star guards carries with it a limited ceiling.
So…we should all be rooting for Cleveland to win this series, right?
I’m not totally sure.
