Cavs: 4 crazy stats after the first four games of the season

The Cleveland Cavaliers have played four games this season, and they have been up-and-down affairs that overall should leave fans feeling good about the state of the team. After two losses to open the year when the Cavs were in each game into the fourth quarter, they came back to beat a pair of playoff teams from last year in the Atlanta Hawks and Denver Nuggets.

Looking at stats this early in the season can be a tricky thing to do. Looking at the defense and turnover numbers after two games would have been nauseating, but now after four they look much more palatable. Trying to extrapolate from four games when you have another 78 games to go can be a fool’s errand.

After four games the stats look a bit wonky, but there are still things to learn about the Cavs from these crazy stats

It’s easy to set the narrative for a team early in the season. How a team starts influences the team’s perception in an outsized way because there is no other data to balance it out with. There will be 19.5 other four-game sample sets during the year; these four games matter just as much as those, but probably not much more than them.

Yet there is the reality that the start of a season gives us an extra glimpse into the development of players, the deployment of lineups, the offseason alterations to team strategy. To that end we can look at some of the crazy stats from the early season and decide why they are happening and how likely they are to continue.

To that end, let’s look at four crazy stats, starting with a budding superstar on the defensive end.