Cleveland wants more than this.
Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson wasn’t interested in hearing about how good his team had been before they dismantled the Charlotte Hornets for their 10th straight win by double figures. It was a victory that put them on a 73-win pace.
“Absolutely not,” said Atkinson when asked about whether he thinks this is a historically good team.
The Cavs will need to prove that they are in the playoffs, but they’ve done all they can so far. They’ve been blowing the doors off of their competition in a way that hasn’t been seen often throughout NBA history.
The questions will only get louder the longer this goes on. But this level of winning in the regular season isn’t something the Cavs believe will distract them. In fact, they may not even care about it.
“I really don’t think it’ll become important to be honest,” said Darius Garland. “We’re all winners on this team. We’ve all won at a pretty high level, from elementary school, AAU, to college with Ty [Jerome], and the championship with Tristan [Thompson]. So I mean, we all know what it feels like to win regular games. So our next step is to win the Eastern Conference Finals and go to the Finals.”
Regular season success to this degree can be predictive of what will happen in the postseason. The level of consistency needed to play at this high of a level for six months translates to playoff success. The Boston Celtics showed that last season as the habits they built over their 64-win campaign carried them through to a stress-free championship.
“It’s hard to win in this league, and so you definitely don’t take [what the Cavs are doing] for granted,” said Hornets head coach Charles Lee who was an assistant with Boston last season. “What they’re doing right now, the ability to be locked in and focused every night is really important. no matter who you’re playing. And no matter if it’s the day after Christmas, on Christmas, a Tuesday in February, or whatever it is. … Consistency is hard. We all fight that as human beings.”
Teams that win in the playoffs have habits that they can fall back on. You can’t switch the flip in the spring and summer and expect everything to fall into place. That is forged in stretches like this.
Atkinson has talked about this team having an “appropriate fear.” That has shown through in how they seemingly don’t take days off. This is what will take them to where they want to go.
“They’ve been through battles,” Atkinson said. “The Orlando series, the Knicks series. They know what the playoffs look like. Some teams don’t. … This team has been battle-tested in the playoffs. That leads to that kind of humility.”
Being battle-tested also means you know where your weaknesses are. Atkinson has successfully addressed many of these shortcomings. The significantly improved half-court offense and the defense that is more comfortable switching is considerably better set up for postseason basketball. But there are still things to work on.
“The physicality rises in the playoffs,” Atkinson said. “Defensively applying more physicality, and then offensively, [being] able to handle physicality. … I think we have lapses where teams start getting into us and we don’t cut as hard, we don’t screen as hard, we don’t get open like we should. So just having that edge to us on both ends in terms of physicality.”
The Cavs will get an idea of whether or not they’re ready for playoff physicality on Wednesday. The Oklahoma City Thunder are on a 15-game winning streak and overpowered the Celtics on Sunday. Their defensive strength at the point-of-attack held Boston’s potent offense to just 27 second-half points.
This will be an important test for Garland and Evan Mobley. Both are having the best seasons of their careers, but have struggled against rangy, physical defenses like Oklahoma City’s in the past. How they handle it on Wednesday and when they play again on Jan. 16 will give us an idea of whether the individual and team success can fully transfer over to the postseason.
In the meantime, all the Cavs can do is win their scheduled games against inferior opponents. That’s something they’ve grown quite accustomed to doing.
“[Winning in the] regular [is] season, super cool,” Garland said. “It’s like a ramp-up for what we’re trying to get to. So yeah, if we’re on that pace trying to keep winning games. Like I said, it’s nothing you take for granted. [You’d] take it for sure. We love it, but our next step is to win playoff games and get to the Eastern Conference Finals. So I think that’s where we’re looking forward to, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.”