Believe it or not: The Cavaliers are one of the most dominant teams we’ve ever seen

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Is it time to take the Cavaliers seriously as contenders? (David Richard-Imagn Images)

If you’re looking for accuracy, one pretty good place to look is the greatest shooter of all time.

“You’re as good as your record says you are,” Stephen Curry said. “So they’re pretty damn good right now.”

“They” are the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Curry said that on Nov. 8, after watching them drop 83 points on his Warriors’ heads in a half en route to a blowout win. Nearly two months later, what the record’s saying is that “pretty damn good” might be a galactic understatement.

The Cavs come into Friday’s matchup with the Mavericks riding an eight-game winning streak, with every victory coming by double digits. They just went 12-1 in December, blowing opponents’ doors off by a league-high 15.2 points per 100 possessions.

They enter Dallas at 29-4 — 29-4! — which makes them just the 12th team ever to start a season with 29 wins in 33 tries. Six of the first 11 went on to win the NBA title; Curry’s 2015-16 Warriors started 31-2, won an NBA-record 73 games, and came up one win short in one of the greatest NBA Finals of all time.

After missing a combined 89 games last season, the core four of Donovan Mitchell, Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen and Darius Garland have missed a total of four thus far this season; turns out having all your best dudes helps a lot. New head coach Kenny Atkinson has helped a lot, too, both in terms of how he’s managed staggering the core four — he’s largely paired Mitchell with Mobley and Garland with Allen, and Cleveland’s been excellent in both alignments — and in how he’s juiced the Cavaliers’ attack.

Cleveland’s winning formula

The Cavs are playing faster, generating more possessions (eighth in pace this season, up from 24th last season) and getting shots up more quickly (38.9% of their attempts have come in the first nine seconds of the shot clock, up from 32.3% last season). That’s held true even after giving up a bucket; they’ve shaved more than a second off of their average time-to-shot following a made basket, according to Inpredictable, a commitment to…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2025-01-03 18:51:00

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