NBA Kram Session: The Cavs and the Cav-Nots

Getty Images/Ringer illustration What in the world is going on in the East? In the first Kram Session of the season, we dive deep into Cleveland's winning formula, marvel at the Celtics' boundless pursuit of the 3, and survey the ineptitude pervading the rest of the conference. The East is weird this year. The Cleveland Cavaliers remain undefeated nearly a month into the season. The Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers are a combined 7-20. Only four teams have more wins than losses. Let's embrace that weirdness in the first Kram Session of the season. At regular intervals throughout the NBA season, we'll stuff as much analysis as possible into this column. Today, we'll analyze the East from top to bottom—starting in Cleveland, as the top-seeded Cavaliers prepare to face the second-seeded Boston Celtics in a must-watch game on Tuesday. Under Review: The Cleveland Cavaliers' Staggering Ascent Even if the Cavaliers weren't undefeated, Tuesday's NBA Cup clash in Boston would stand out on the schedule. It's a matchup between the two best teams in the East, between the two top offenses in the NBA, between the reigning champs and the team that poses possibly the greatest threat to their return to Finals. But the Cavaliers are undefeated, which adds another layer of intrigue to the biggest game of the season so far. The Cavs' 15-0 record ties the second-longest winning streak to start a season in NBA history. They're nine wins away from the 2015-16 Warriors' 24-0 start. This ferocious front-running isn't what many observers expected of Cleveland. Sure, last year's Cavaliers won their first playoff series without LeBron James since 1993, but the manner in which they ended their 2023-24 season wasn't particularly encouraging. Cavs brass held such little faith in their team that they egregiously tanked their final regular-season contest to set up a slightly more favorable playoff matchup against Orlando—a series in which they eked out a win in seven games. Their stars weren't meshing, and Donovan Mitchell was just a year away from free agency. They fired coach J.B. Bickerstaff and seemed poised for even more major changes. And now, just a few months later, the Cavaliers rank first in offensive rating and points per game, in 2-point percentage and 3-point percentage, and—most importantly—in wins. Even LeBron's Cavs never started a season better than 13-2. Cleveland is blowing away the competition with the exact same players who struggled to score and harmonize for large stretches of last season. Here's how much better Cleveland has shot the ball than any other team: The gap in effective field goal percentage between the Cavaliers and second-place Knicks is larger than the gap between the Knicks and 13th place. The Cavaliers are thriving not because of massive roster shake-ups but due to better balance from their four stars: Mitchell and Darius Garland in the backcourt and Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen in the frontcourt. This is the third season they've all played together, which gives Cleveland an advantage in a league with such significant annual turnover. Head coach Kenny Atkinson is new to the team, but the Cavaliers have 99 percent roster continuity, meaning 99 percent of their minutes have gone to players who were on the team last season. (The only exceptions are the little-used Jaylon Tyson, Luke Travers, and JT Thor, who have combined for 37 minutes—almost all of them in garbage time.) The only other team with so much continuity this season is the Celtics, whose only new player is rookie Baylor Scheierman. "It's made my job 100 times easier. Continuity is a coach's dream," Atkinson said last week in Chicago. He's made schematic and rotation tweaks, but he's also leaned into his players' built-in chemistry. "Sometimes they'll just run a play from last year. I'm like, 'What play was that? We don't run that,'" Atkinson said with a laugh. But then the play works—"and then it's like, 'Man, that's pretty good!'" One of Atkinson's conscious coaching decisions is to play his best players less to keep them energized through a long season and (hopefully) postseason. Mitchell leads the team with only 31.1 minutes per game—an average that ranks 70th among qualified players. Mobley, Garland, and Allen rank between 75th and 78th. That relative lack of playing time means the Cavs' individual surface stats are misleading. It may seem like Mitchell's production has dropped, for instance, but he's actually right in line with previous seasons on a per-36-minute basis. And Mobley and Garland might appear to have made merely incremental improvements, but the youngest members of Cleveland's core are actually scoring at career-best rates by a wide margin. Mobley is handling the ball more this season, and his usage rate, which had stuck between 20 and 21 percent in each of his first three NBA seasons, is up to 24 percent. He's still not shooting many 3s, but that doesn't mean he's not growing as a player. For Garland, this early surge represents a considerable bounce-back after his 2023-24 season was waylaid by injuries and a death in the family. His performance suffered, and he spent the summer in trade rumors of varying intensities. But Garland has regained his All-Star form and then some. It's not just that the sixth-year guard is handling more late-game responsibilities or that he's making both 2-pointers (58 percent) and 3s (46 percent) at career-best rates. It's that he's playing with confidence and verve again; he looks eager to attack defenders off the bounce after deferring too often a year ago. Asked about Garland's play, Mitchell launched into an impassioned defense of his teammate. "We live in a world where it's like, whatever happened recently, that's who you are. And I hate it," Mitchell said last week. "Especially for him last year, he got poked in the eye, he got his jaw wired shut, he had stuff obviously with the family. Life happens, you go through stuff, and he had his ups and downs, but the year before that, he was hoopin'. How soon we forget." Now Garland is back to hoopin', and his ascension helps solve one of Cleveland's recent issues, which was a tendency for the offense to devolve into Mitchell going one-on-five in crunch time. "My role this year has been different," Mitchell said. "I think everybody knows me as a scorer, but for us to be who we want to be, it's not just myself. It's DG, it's Ev, it's Caris , it's whoever. For me, it's about balancing that, picking my spots, empowering everybody." That word—"empower"—came up several times in conversations with Cavaliers last week. A desire for Mitchell to "empower" his younger teammates was one of the factors behind Atkinson's decision to split up his team's positional overlaps by matching Mitchell with Mobley and Garland with Allen—as opposed to last season, when the veterans and young'uns split along age lines. "Donovan's a coach on the floor," Atkinson explained. "I hear him constantly talking, and Evan's still a young player, right? You need guidance sometimes. Evan's a very smart player, but when your best player is constantly in his ear and helping him out, that's been a big part of those guys being such a good combination." To be fair, every Cavaliers combination thus far has been a good combination. Mitchell with Mobley is the best of the best, but the starring quartet is also meshing better after a lackluster 2023-24 performance. Last season, Cleveland's approach to staggering its top four players came from a position of weakness because their redundancies meant they didn't fit well together. But individual improvements from Mobley and Garland mean that the narrative has shifted: Now, the stagger comes from a position of strength, as Atkinson has the luxury of always anchoring his offense with an All-Star point guard and his defense with an All-Star-caliber big. "You can always have two of those four guys out there at any given time, and that makes it obviously challenging ," Bulls coach Billy Donovan said before two losses to Cleveland last week. "You're putting elite scorers out there for 48 minutes." Cleveland has spent most of this season leaning into this stagger, with two of its four stars on the court. When they've all been available in the same game, the Cavaliers have used lineups with one or zero of them just 3 percent of the time, according to an analysis of data from PBP Stats (with low-leverage, garbage-time minutes removed). While other contenders struggle to survive their bench minutes, the Cavaliers can cycle from one successful lineup to another. That's not to say Cleveland's new coach is rigid with his rotations. Rather, Atkinson is also using the regular season to sprinkle in small lineup experiments, such as letting the shockingly productive Ty Jerome run the show at times or going small with Dean Wade at center. Atkinson has recent experience with such small-ball tactics, as he spent the last four years as an assistant with the Warriors and Clippers. "I hate to say it, but he did it to us in Utah, when they put Batum at the 5," Mitchell said, referring to Atkinson's presence with the Clippers during an infamous playoff series. Such rotational flexibility should serve Cleveland well in the postseason, and Atkinson has both the leeway and prerogative to experiment because his team is already assured of getting there. Cleveland is listed with a 100 percent chance of reaching the playoffs, according to ESPN's BPI projections, because most of the East's other contenders have stumbled out of the gate. That's where the Cavaliers' true test will begin. The Cavaliers are just 6-11 in the playoffs with this core, and no matter how many regular-season games they win, questions will linger about their potency as a playoff contender until they can prove their postseason mettle. It's an interesting debate. Which team has the best chance to dethrone the Celtics in the East: the scorching, chemistry-infused Cavs or a theoretically higher-ceiling rival like the Knicks, Bucks, or 76ers? Answers won't arrive until springtime. For now, the Cavaliers can only wait to see how they'll respond once they meet their first bit of adversity after a perfect first month. Their schedule will get tougher starting Tuesday in Boston. Their shooters won't stay this hot all season. They probably won't stay quite so healthy. (Max Strus has missed this whole run due to an ankle sprain, but every other key Cavalier has played at least 13 of 15 games.) "It's great, we're playing well, vibes are good, but we have to continue to be this team," Mitchell said. "I have no doubt we will, but that's been my thing: Are we going to continue to be this team in January, February, March, April?" Photo by Brian Fluharty/Getty Images Zacht of the Week The Celtics would be on pace to shatter the all-time 3-point record even if Jaylen Brown hadn't attempted a single 3 all season. Speaking of Donovan Mitchell, the team record for 3-point makes in a season is 16.7 per game, from his 2020-21 Jazz. But the 2024-25 Celtics are up at 18.9 3s per game, and they'd still be at 17.5 even if Brown—the reigning Finals MVP who is averaging 6.8 3-point attempts per game—hadn't attempted a single shot from distance all season. While the Jazz set their record through impeccable accuracy—they benefited from playing in empty arenas in the highest-accuracy 3-point season in NBA history—the Celtics are pushing past them with sheer volume. A whopping 56 percent of their shot attempts this season are 3s. That figure makes the Celtics an anomaly even in a league seeking out more and more 3s. Previously, teams set new records for 3-point attempt rate—the proportion of shots that come from distance—in 2009, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. But the records—and the league's broader 3-point explosion—stopped there. Until now, the only teams to take more than half of their shots from distance were Mike D'Antoni's Rockets. Even in 2024-25, nobody besides Boston is north of 50 percent. Joe Mazzulla scoffed at the invisible ceiling, and his team launched right through it. Among the top seven Celtics in shot attempts this season, only Brown is taking more 2s than 3s. That's a meaningful shift even from last season, when Brown, Jayson Tatum, and Jrue Holiday (and Kristaps Porzingis, who hasn't played yet this season) all did so. Other than Brown and Sam Hauser, who was already taking a ton of 3s, all the key Celtics have increased their 3-point attempt rates by a larger margin than the NBA as a whole. Hardwood History: The Precedent for Losing Teams in the Playoffs We started today's piece by analyzing the Cavaliers and Celtics—but now it's time to talk about how atrocious the rest of their conference is. As of Monday, ESPN's BPI projections forecast the Cavaliers and Celtics to push for 60-plus wins—and no other Eastern teams to exceed 45 victories. According to this projection, the 11th-place team in the West—which won't even qualify for the play-in tournament—is projected to have as many wins, on average, as the East's no. 5 seed. The next five months probably won't shake out exactly that way. This forecast calculates the average expectation for each team, and some Eastern teams are bound to beat the average. But it's eminently conceivable that multiple Eastern squads will reach the playoffs with losing records. Recently, that's happened about once every five years—in the East every time, of course. But no conference has seen three teams reach the playoffs with losing records since 1996-97. Here's a list of all the years with multiple sub-.500 postseason qualifiers in the 16-team playoff era: 2020 East: Nets (35-37), Magic (33-40) 2015 East: Celtics (40-42), Nets (38-44) 2008 East: 76ers (40-42), Hawks (37-45) 2004 East: Knicks (39-43), Celtics (36-46) 1997 West: Timberwolves (40-42), Suns (40-42), Clippers (36-46) 1992 East: Nets (40-42), Pacers (40-42), Heat (38-44) 1988 East: Bullets (38-44), Knicks (38-44) 1987 West: SuperSonics (39-43), Nuggets (37-45) 1986 East: Bullets (39-43), Nets (39-43), Bulls (30-52) 1986 West: Trail Blazers (40-42), Kings (37-45), Spurs (35-47) 1985 East: Bullets (40-42), Bulls (38-44), Cavaliers (36-46) 1984 East: Hawks (40-42), Bullets (35-47) 1984 West: Nuggets (38-44), Kings (38-44) Note the preponderance of teams from the 1980s here. This phenomenon was much more common before rapid expansion, when around two-thirds of teams reached the playoffs every year. Some subpar squads even surged in the playoffs. In an older postseason format, the 1980-81 Rockets reached the Finals after a 40-42 regular season, and the 1986-87 SuperSonics reached the conference finals despite a 39-43 record. But those SuperSonics were the last of their kind. Playoff qualifiers with a losing record since 1987 are 0-for-31 in postseason series, with a record of 27-110 in individual playoff games—a win rate of just 20 percent. (Let's give partial credit to the Hawks, the only sub-.500 team in the 21st century to push a series to seven games. They did so twice. In 2007-08, they went 37-45 and nearly pulled off a historic upset against the 66-16 Celtics, weeks away from winning the title. And in 2013-14, they went 38-44 before scaring the Pacers and just about transforming modern basketball—and ruining Roy Hibbert's career—in the process. Remember Pero Antic!) That's an ominous sign for prospective contenders who, based on their rotten starts, might end up in the playoffs with a losing record; odds are they wouldn't advance very far as, say, a no. 6 seed with a 39-43 record. On the flip side, it suggests that the first round could be the easiest of cakewalks for the Celtics and Cavaliers, who at this point seem very likely to face opponents with more losses than wins. It's still mid-November, and BPI already gives both Boston and Cleveland more than a 90 percent chance to reach the second round. A Graph Is Worth a Thousand Words Eastern Conference teams have won just 32.7 percent of their games against Western opponents this season. Only once in NBA history has a conference won less than 36.7 percent of its inter-conference games over a full season: in 1959-60, when the NBA had only eight franchises and the four teams in the West beat the four teams in the East just 29.2 percent of the time. Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images Fast Breaks Four of the eight teams that reached the 2023-24 postseason double as the only four Eastern squads with a winning record this year: Cleveland, Boston, Orlando (where Franz Wagner has stepped up immensely in Paolo Banchero's absence), and New York (which is riding the Karl-Anthony Towns rollercoaster to generally positive effect). That leaves four reigning playoff squads with losing records. And each of them has a star (or two) who needs to step up their game if their team is to turn its fortunes around. 1. Milwaukee Bucks: Damian Lillard Milwaukee's formula in its first post–Mike Budenholzer season wasn't ultimately successful, but at least the 2023-24 Bucks could score. Now, their offense is just as bad as the glaringly problematic defense. A variety of factors contribute to the Bucks' offensive decline. Khris Middleton remains sidelined by injuries, big men Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis have regressed, and offseason additions Gary Trent Jr. and Delon Wright look completely out of sorts. But the greatest concern might be that Lillard, now 34 years old, simply isn't the same player for whom the Bucks traded so much last year. Offensive box plus-minus says Lillard has improved the Bucks' scoring by 4.5 points per 100 possessions this season compared to an average player. That's better than he managed in his first up-and-down season in Milwaukee (plus-3.4) and a top-20 mark in the league. But it's also worse than he managed in his last seven full seasons in Portland, when he was regularly a top-five offensive player. During his Portland prime, Lillard led the Trail Blazers to an elite offense almost every season. But this version of Lillard—who certainly isn't contributing on defense and thus needs to excel on the other end—isn't boosting the Bucks high enough, even when he's playing next to Giannis Antetokounmpo in an MVP-worthy individual campaign. A game-winner in his first contest in a week is a good start! Just ignore the fact that Lillard made only five of his first 17 shots in Monday's game before the final moments. 2. Miami Heat: Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler The good news is that Tyler Herro has unequivocally been Miami's best player this season. The bad news is that Miami's offense is still stuck in the mud because Butler has been either hurt or ineffective, and Adebayo's jump shot has completely abandoned him. It's not just that Adebayo's much-awaited, much-ballyhooed embrace of 3-pointers has resulted in only 10 makes in 13 games; it's that he's making only 37 percent of his midrange attempts, per Cleaning the Glass. That's not ideal when Adebayo is taking more than half of his shots from that area. On the other end, meanwhile, Adebayo is allowing opponents to shoot 79 percent at the rim (42 makes on 53 attempts) when he's the closest player—an unfathomable showing from one of the NBA's premier defenders. It's too early to be worried about a relatively small sample of attempts, but that's barely better than Towns's much-mocked defense at the rim. 3. Indiana Pacers: Tyrese Haliburton Haliburton experienced a massive drop-off midway through last season after he suffered a hamstring injury that lingered for months. He still hasn't bounced back. Haliburton's per-game averages look a lot more like his 2023-24 post-injury figures—and his efficiency is even worse, as his shooting percentages have declined across the board. For a glorious half of a season, Haliburton might have been the best non-Jokic offensive player in the sport. Now his numbers make him look like … Lakers-era Russell Westbrook? Aside from usage rate, the stats are frighteningly similar. Frankly, it's a testament to Pascal Siakam's steadiness and Bennedict Mathurin's post-hype rise that Indiana is even close to treading water, at 6-8, with its best player struggling so dearly. 4. Philadelphia 76ers: Joel Embiid and Paul George The 76ers' problem is their stars' health rather than their performance. Embiid and George missed the start of this season; then Tyrese Maxey, who was trying his hardest to hold down the fort with his costars sidelined, strained his hamstring. The 76ers' Big Three have shared the court for precisely zero minutes. Only the Pelicans, Raptors, and Grizzlies have devoted more cap space to injured players this season than the 76ers, per Spotrac. To some extent, that explains the 76ers' 2-11 start, as the Pelicans and Raptors are also mighty underachievers this season. But the concern is that George and Embiid both have extensive injury histories, and both players have looked rusty when available thus far. The only silver lining in Philadelphia's playbook (get it?!) is that the 76ers play in such a terrible conference that they haven't fallen too far behind in the playoff race despite their disastrous first month.

NBA Kram Session: The Cavs and the Cav-Nots

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