Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday weekend.
In today’s SI:AM:
⛏️ Niners back on track
📊 NFL power rankings
🏈 Big Week 12 CFB matchups
A dozen straight wins
There’s only one undefeated team left in the NBA this season, and it might come as a bit of a surprise.
After a 119–113 win over the Chicago Bulls on Monday, the Cleveland Cavaliers are 12–0 on the year and the only team in the league with fewer than two losses.
The winning streak is the longest to open a season since the 2015–16 Golden State Warriors won their first 24 games en route to an all-time best 73–9 finish. In the last 30 years, only two other teams have started a season with at least 12 straight wins (the 1996–97 Chicago Bulls, who finished 69–13, and the 2002–03 Dallas Mavericks, who finished 60–22). Cleveland's streak is also one of the longest an NBA team has had at any point in recent history. Since the start of the 2018–19 season, only six teams (including this year’s Cavs) have won at least 12 games in a row in a single season. It’s also already one of the longest streaks in Cleveland history, just one win away from tying the franchise record.
The wins haven’t always come easily for the Cavs. Only six of the 12 victories have been by double digits, but they’ve done well to find ways to win tightly contested games. In Monday’s win in Chicago, Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson turned to an unconventional lineup at a key juncture in the game, deploying a center-less group consisting of all bench players: Ty Jerome, Sam Merrill, Caris LeVert, Georges Niang and Dean Wade.
The switch came while the Cavs were trailing by seven points with about five minutes left in the third quarter. Closing out the quarter with an untested, nontraditional lineup was a gamble. If it backfired, Cleveland could have been facing a significant deficit heading into the fourth quarter. But it worked. Those five out-scored the Bulls 19–9 and the Cavs took a 95–92 lead into the final frame.
“We were just searching,” Atkinson said of the lineup decision. “We were searching for something to give us a spark.”
This is Atkinson's his first year in charge of the Cavs, replacing J.B. Bickerstaff, who was fired at the end of the last season after five years at the helm. But the change at coach is the only big difference between last year’s team that went 48–34 and this year’s. The top 10 players in minutes per game from last year’s team are all still on the roster, although Max Strus (who started 70 games last season) has yet to play this season due to an ankle injury. Donovan Mitchell, who had a season-high 36 points on 12-of-26 shooting on Monday night, is still the driving force behind the Cavs’ success. The difference is that the rest of the Cleveland offense has been better during this hot start than it was last season. The Cavs ranked 20th last year in points per game and 18th in offensive efficiency. This season, they’re leading the league in both categories. Last season, they were 12th in field goal percentage and 15th in three-point percentage. This season, they’re ranked first in both metrics—and by a wide margin.
It’s possible that the Cavs’ excellent start is the product of hot shooting and that they’ll come back down to earth once their shooters regress to the mean. But it’s also possible that Atkinson is pushing all the right buttons to unlock the full offensive potential of a group that has a lot of experience playing together. The Cavs almost certainly won't challenge the Warriors’ record for wins in a season, but they might be more of a threat in the Eastern Conference than it seemed at the start of the season.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Albert Breer makes the case for why the 49ers are better than their early-season struggles would have you believe.
- Similarly, Conor Orr thinks it’s time to give the Cardinals credit for turning things around as quickly as they did.
- Gilberto Manzano believes Brock Purdy’s performance in San Francisco’s comeback win shows why he’ll soon be the NFL’s new highest-paid player.
- The Commanders had the biggest drop in Orr’s NFL power rankings.
- Pat Forde highlighted seven college football games in Week 12 that could make or break a team’s season.
- Michael Fabiano recommends you add Audric Estime and Ricky Pearsall to your fantasy football team.
- Giants coach Brian Daboll left the door open for making a change at quarterback after another rough game from Daniel Jones.
The top five…
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Cavaliers’ Hot Start Among the Best in NBA History.
