The Cleveland Cavaliers Are Dialed In

“I like building little machines,” the Cleveland Cavaliers’ center Jarrett Allen once told a local reporter. He was describing the soil-humidity reader he’d crafted one weekend so that he could know when to water his plants. He grew up taking his toys apart, trying to soup up his Nerf guns. As a kid, he broke open one of his dad’s old computers to tinker with it. In high school, he built his own. This, apparently, raised flags during the draft process, in 2017, and he dropped down the boards. There were “questions about his commitment,” as the New York Times put it, as if a curiosity about the way things worked had nothing to do with basketball. The Brooklyn Nets snagged him with the twenty-second pick.

The Nets were horrible back then, a laughingstock, one of the worst teams in the league. They’d finished 20–62 the season before Allen was drafted, and only won a few more games during his rookie year. The team had long ago gambled away its lottery picks and, so it had seemed, its future. But already something was changing, and Allen was part of that shift. He’s long and athletic, around seven feet tall (plus afro), with quick hands and feet. He has a particular kind of charisma on the court—vicious blocks, emphatic dunks, a certain kind of insouciance. Other promising overlooked players were arriving, including the crafty Spencer Dinwiddie and the sweet-shooting Caris LeVert, and the team had a coach, Kenny Atkinson, who was known for his ability to develop young players. There was talk of a changing culture, which could sound hopelessly vague. What is culture, anyway? And yet it was hard to deny that something difficult to measure was making a difference. What a player like Allen offered wasn’t only athleticism and a long wingspan but also an openness to information, a sense of pleasure in building something from scratch. “Honestly, my second year there, we just had this vibe about us where we’re just going out and playing, having fun,” Allen said, of his time in Brooklyn, on J. J. Redick and Tommy Alter’s podcast. “I mean, there’s this clip of us just shooting threes. Everybody’s dancing on the sideline. We’re having the time of our lives. Were we the best team? No. But we were enjoying ourselves, and playing hard, and winning.” The Nets surprised the league by making the playoffs in Allen’s second season, and again in his third, but they were beaten both times in the first round.

In 2019, the team signed Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant, two of the biggest stars in the world. Before the end of their first season together, Atkinson was out, not having earned Durant’s and Irving’s trust, or perhaps not having trusted them. Not long after the start of the next season, Allen and LeVert were gone, too, traded as part of a four-team blockbuster that brought the Nets James Harden; Allen went to the Cleveland Cavaliers, LaVert to the Indiana Pacers. It seemed like a good idea at the time—at least to some people, some of the time.

During the few stretches in which all three superstars were healthy and on the floor together, the Nets were one of the greatest offensive teams that the league has ever seen. But those periods were rare, and the Nets won only one playoff series before blowing up the group. Now Durant is in Arizona, Harden is in Los Angeles, and Irving is in Dallas. Last season, the Nets lost fifty games, and not much hope is on the horizon. Allen, meanwhile, has become an All-Star-calibre player for the Cavaliers. After LeBron James decamped Cleveland for Los Angeles, in 2018, the Cavaliers had been as bad as the Nets. But, in Allen’s first full season with the team, the Cavs crept up back over five hundred, and made the playoffs the following season. Along with Allen, the Cavs had a franchise star in Donovan Mitchell, a dynamic, explosive scorer who had arrived from the Utah Jazz, and a young big man with top-line talent, Evan Mobley, who was immediately impactful, particularly on defense. They had a promising point guard, Darius Garland. LeVert arrived from the Pacers to lead the second unit, giving the team depth. (His stint with the Pacers had been delayed while he received cancer treatment, after his post-trade physical discovered a tumor on his kidney. The Harden-to-the-Nets trade has to go down as one of the best deals in history, only for that.) But that Cavs team was bullied out of the playoffs by the New York Knicks, in a first-round sweep. “Even for me, the lights were brighter than expected,” Allen said.

Allen got flak for that; a competitor is supposed to be ready for anything. But he was being honest. The noise of Madison Square Garden in May hits differently, maybe especially for a young and inexperienced squad. So does the physicality of playoff basketball. The pressure, the cumulative fatigue, the sense that it’s no longer just enough to dance on the sidelines—the team wasn’t calibrated for that yet. Last season, the Cavs made it a round further, beating the Orlando Magic before bowing out to the eventual champion, the Boston Celtics. But it had been a weird season. Garland broke his jaw mid-season, in December, and had played horribly after. Mobley missed nearly half the season with leg injuries, and couldn’t shoot when he was on the floor. Mitchell was injured, and Allen missed much of the playoffs owing to a cracked rib. The team won more often when more players were injured, and they seemed to work less well together when all the stars were on the floor. How could the two bigs, Allen and Mobley, figure out how to work together on offense? Were Mitchell and Garland an uneasy fit? Even the win over the Magic in the post-season failed to quiet the questions. All season, the Cavs seemed to be “waiting,” the journalist Katie Hiendl wrote in her newsletter, Basketball Feelings. “Like they were checking around with each other to see who would go first. Individually, they knew what to do, together, they were hesitating.” Trade rumors flew. Instead, the team fired the coach, J. B. Bickerstaff, and brought in Atkinson. The core parts remained.

This season, the Cavs, who had been among the slower teams in the league last season, are playing fast. They’re driving more. They’re moving off the ball with more purpose—particularly Garland, who seems to have left his struggles behind. (Conditioning was a major focus in the off-season, he said.) Mobley has been blocking shots, leading fast breaks, showing more offensive versatility. Mitchell sometimes seems to be scoring at will, but not alone. Allen is averaging a double-double, and advanced metrics show that he is impacting the game at an élite level. The team has both a Top Ten offensive and defensive rating. They leaped out to a 9–0 start, the best in franchise history, and then routed the Warriors, in Cleveland, to improve to 10–0. Then, on Saturday night, they rolled to 11–0 with a win over the Nets. They are the last undefeated team in the league.

There is a sense of direction across the floor, on both ends. No one is waiting anymore. It is perhaps natural that the team is showing more cohesion this season than last. Players learn each other’s tendencies, play off their strengths, find where they align. A good team can seem like a contraption of intricate interlocking parts, and so far Atkinson seems to have good ideas for how to scheme it and when to let it run. You can see the cascading effects of different improvements: how Mobley’s increased aggression on offense makes lineups with him and Allen on the floor more effective; how Garland’s off-ball movement opens up opportunities for Mitchell; how more dribble drives open more passing lanes. The team has already had more hundred-and-thirty-plus-point games as it did the entire season before.

Will it last? The Cavs have had an easy schedule so far. It can be hard to maintain an increased intensity all season. Injuries will happen. But the fun of watching this team right now is in the feeling of possibility they project, the sense that no player is a fixed entity, that what was broken can be reimagined, that there is pleasure in building little machines. ♦