Cleveland Cavaliers are 10-0. Are they for real?

So, 10-0. We’re not talking about the defending champion Boston Celtics or the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are tabbed as one of the teams destined for a deep playoff run. The Cleveland Cavaliers have run off the first 10 games of the 2024-25 season, and the majority of those have been in dominant fashion. Number 10 was at home against the 7-1 Golden State Warriors, winning 136-117 on Friday night. The game wasn’t that close. The Cavs were up 83-42 at halftime. That isn’t a typo. That’s a score that makes the Warriors wonder if SkyNet has been compromised.

The Cavs are off to the best start in franchise history. World B. Free couldn’t get the Cavs to start 10-0. Mark Price and Brad Daugherty didn’t make it happen. Bob Sura and Shawn Kemp didn’t come close. Not even LeBron James was able to orchestrate a 10-0 to start a season (though he did go 9-1 to begin 2016-17). Almost the same Cavs roster (or the core at least) started 8-2 back in the 2022-23 season, but this feels so much different from that team. I’ve been someone who continues to say the Cavs are one of those teams we have to see excel in the playoffs before I’ll buy them as a true title contender. However, this start has made me question if it’s wise to stick with such stubbornness. Cleveland is putting on a show that is comparable to some of the great teams in the last 15-20 years. Maybe ever?

There is a dominance happening that isn’t just about the 10 wins. It’s the way they’re winning with Kenny Atkinson at the helm. This wasn’t a bad Cavs team last season. J.B. Bickerstaff had this squad playing great basketball over the last couple years, and he managed their vast number of injuries and games missed about as well as you could expect. However, he got scapegoated by the front office when the Cavs were trounced in the second-round last season, after barely surviving the first-round against Orlando. Now, they’re playing even more inspired basketball under the early days of Atkinson, who was hired to replace Bickerstaff this summer.

I think just about everybody, even those fans in Cleveland, would still have the Celtics (8-2) as the best team in the East. And the road naturally goes through them, no matter how the standings end up. So, how seriously should we take the Cavs’ start? How much of this is an indication of a leap being taken by the team? With Donovan Mitchell sticking around (three-year, $150 million extension this summer) and Evan Mobley making a leap, has this team calmed all of the concerns of the past to overcome perceived roster construction issues?

Let’s answer some questions about this Cavs start and what it could mean in my favorite way possible: I’m going to talk to myself.

Has the Cavaliers’ 10-0 start been inflated by a weak schedule? 

This is actually a pretty interesting dynamic of their great start. The win over the Warriors was stellar. Golden State is off to a tremendous start, and Cleveland lit up the Warriors’ world-class defense early and often. The Cavs have quality wins over the Knicks and Dubs, and they obliterated the Lakers. They just beat the Pelicans in New Orleans, who are pretty injured but still had Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram. Let’s call that 3.5 quality wins off the rip. They started the season tuning up the Raptors, Pistons and Wizards. They’re expected to win those. But they still won them and did so by a combined 61 points. They also have a win over a good Magic team, but it was after Paolo Banchero got injured and missed the game. We could give them another half-quality win to push it to four.

The other two games — two close wins over the Bucks — is where it gets a little complicated because the Bucks are supposed to be good … but they’re very much not. Milwaukee is supposed to be one of the top teams in the East, and it is near the bottom despite its two stars being healthy and playing well. So, you can nitpick the wins over the Bucks being close calls for the Cavs, but ultimately, they won two clutch games. They didn’t crumble. Whether it’s 3.5, four, 4.5 or five quality wins (depending on how you measure the Bucks games), that’s still more than enough for a 10-game sample size. They’re mostly smacking the teams in front of them.

What is different about the Cavs of the previous two seasons? 

Before we dive into how these Cavs measure up against the previous two seasons, it’s important to note the Cavs had a slow start to last season with Darius Garland missing four of the first 10 games, Jarrett Allen missing five of those first 10, and Donovan Mitchell missing a game. Even though they had a deeper bench, the core four wasn’t fully healthy to begin the campaign. With that said, these Cavs are even blowing the two other teams out of the water. That makes sense considering they’re dominating everybody by 12.7 points per 100 possessions. The Cavs are playing offense at an unheard-of level. Check out how they compare to their first 10 games in each of the prior two seasons.

Cleveland’s shooting has been incendiary. The Cavs are actually shooting a lower 3-point volume than they did last season. The difference is the Cavs look like last year’s Celtics, with 42.7 percent of their attempts going in. Like a Pete Davidson tabloid relationship, this probably isn’t sustainable, and it’s making people playing the Cavs wonder why life isn’t breaking the same way for themselves. Of their nine-highest volume shooters from distance, only Mobley (31.6 percent) and Georges Niang (34.2 percent) have lower than 35 percent accuracy. Niang is a career 39.6-percent 3-point shooter, too.

It feels like everything the Cavs put up goes in. Cleveland also isn’t creating this offense by living at the free-throw line and playing through the whistles. Cleveland sits near the bottom in free-throw volume, meaning the team is just simply making shots at a higher rate than everybody else.

When you compare the Cavs’ historic start with how the previous two seasons ended up after 82 games, you can see a lot of similarities in how the defense performed. They force turnovers. They rebound well. They keep shooting percentages against them low. And they do a very good job of defending without fouling. So, if the defense holds and they’re able to score even close to the rate they are, this should put the Cavs in a position to control their destiny with home-court advantage in the East.

Their offense is currently better than Boston’s historic offense from last season. The Cavs’ defense is a little better, as well. It’s early, but almost everything on offense across the board is better than last season’s Celtics. However, 10 games does not a championship run make.

How’s the Donovan Mitchell experience now?

I’ve been impressed with how little Mitchell has had to do during this run. That doesn’t mean he’s Tyrese Haliburton getting a gold medal this summer. Mitchell has been playing, and playing great. Everything has just been relatively easy and within the flow of the offense. Mitchell is averaging 22.6 points, 4.1 assists, 3.2 rebounds and is putting up 47.2/38.5/82.4 shooting splits in 29.9 minutes per game.

The five-time All-Star played in only 55 games last season, but let’s compare it to his 2022-23 campaign, which ended with him being named All-NBA Second-Team. That season, Mitchell averaged 28.3-4.4-4.3 in 35.8 minutes per night. He had 48.4/38.6/86.7 shooting splits, which are very comparable to what we’re seeing right now. His usage rate is actually higher now at 30.8 percent compared to 30.1 percent two seasons ago. The Cavs are getting relatively the same production out of him, but they don’t even need him for 30 minutes a night. If this can keep his legs fresh and himself relatively injury-free with the lesser workload, then maybe that saves him for the playoffs.

What about Evan Mobley? 

Now, we’re getting into the real basketball nerdery. The leap people were hoping Mobley would take is definitely here. He’s not a 3-point shooter now like many were hoping. At least not yet. I mentioned his low 3-point percentage above at 31.6 percent. It was 37.5 percent before the Warriors game, when he went 0 of 3. We’re early in the season, so things can fluctuate like that, but he really just doesn’t shoot enough of them yet to even take it seriously good or bad. And that’s fine because he’s demolishing everybody all over the floor.

The 23-year-old is also not playing even 30 minutes per game, clocking in at 29.3 per night. Mobley’s scoring rate is up 1.6 points per game from last year despite him playing 1.3 fewer minutes. However, his usage rate has jumped from 20.6 percent last season to 24.3 percent this season. It’s by far the highest mark of his career. Atkinson is trusting Mobley with a much higher role in the offense, and we haven’t seen a significant drop in his efficiency. Combine that with the smothering defense that has somehow gotten even better than it was before, and you have a nearly complete modern big man. In fact, maybe those Victor Wembanyama DPOY predictions were a year too early with how Mobley could end up if this keeps going.

What are the remaining questions?

Cavs fans will be sick of hear this kind of rhetoric, but it’s pretty simple. Are the Cavs going to be a different team in the playoffs? They were excellent in 2022-23, winning 51 games, sporting a top-10 offense and the best defense in the world. They shot 32.7 percent from deep in their five-game series thumping by the hands of the New York Knicks. Despite all the injuries last season, they still won 48 games. Offensively, they were rough (18th) in comparison, but still had a top-10 defense. They beat Orlando in seven games, and then got beat down by the Celtics in five games. To be fair, Mitchell missed a couple games in that series as Jarrett Allen missed all of them.

It’s also fair to wonder if the Cavs are more like the 2022-23 Sacramento Kings when it comes to the offense. That Kings team had the best offense in NBA history up until the playoffs. Then, it got into a tough first-round matchup with the Warriors and ended up losing in seven games. That historic offense sputtered completely in that playoff series. That may be the fear with the Cavs. We haven’t seen this level of offense out of them. To be fair, we’ve barely seen it out of anybody. Last year’s Celtics are a closer comp numbers-wise, but extrapolating that out from 10 games to 82 plus a deep postseason run is tricky.

Also, is the East as top-heavy as we assumed? Boston is still great. The Knicks are really good but still have a long way to go. The Bucks already have people wondering if Doc Rivers did one last cash grab, and his seat is getting hot. The 76ers are off to a terrible start, still waiting to be healthy and have a bad history of remaining healthy once we get to the postseason. Orlando is dangerous. Indiana is capable. The Heat don’t really have that culture vibe like they did back in 2022. So, maybe this is the right landscape for Cleveland to endure and sustain for a deep playoff run?

When should people start believing? 

It could be fun to believe now! Maybe it ends up looking like believing in the early Warriors. Maybe it ends up looking like believing in last year’s Celtics forming a Voltron of offensive firepower. People love to be early on enjoying a thing and believing in it before anybody else. That way, they get to brag to their friends and, more importantly, strangers on the internet who are constantly refreshing Twitter (I’m never calling it X) to see if they can yell at someone they’ll never meet and call them stupid. It’s the lifeblood of society now and feels so rewarding when you’re right.

It also might end up looking like that Utah Jazz team in 2021 that won 52 of 72 games, had a top-three offense, a top-four defense, a great level of dominance and ended up flaming out in the postseason. Unfortunately, Mitchell is all too familiar with that example. Regardless, the Cavs have at least started to change the narrative and the perception of them. It’s only 10 games, but it’s a historic start.

(Top photo: Jason Miller / Getty Images )