Christmas Day is the premier holiday event for the NBA. The NFL has Thanksgiving, the Indianapolis 500 is over Memorial Day weekend, and college basketball has the entire month of March. College football dominates New Year’s Eve and Day. For the NBA, it’s Christmas.
The league schedules a number of marquee matchups for national television, for fans to put on while they are digesting ham and eggnog. For some time that number has been five games taking place on Christmas Day, spaced out to allow each game its own window. This year the games are in some amount of danger due to the unpredictable spread of the Omicron variant, but the league is taking every precaution to ensure the games go on as planned.
With five games, exactly one third of the league is showcased on Christmas Day. The Cleveland Cavaliers are not one of those teams, and have not been since LeBron James was wearing the wine and gold. In fact the Cavs are such a league afterthought that they don’t even have a national television game on one of the league’s partners — not a single slot on TNT, ESPN or ABC.
The Cavs are off to a hot start, but they don’t have much marketing appeal yet. Can they make it onto the Christmas Day slate sometime in the future?
Could the Cavs make it into the Christmas lineup in the coming years? Let’s look at the factors that put this year’s schedule together and then evaluate how the Cavs might find one of those paths to the league’s marquee holiday.
Ten teams are playing on Christmas Day this year. They are:
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Three criteria seem to connect these ten teams. The easiest way to make it onto the Christmas Day slate is to have all three, but at least one of these factors needs to be present to get the nod. Those factors are: huge market, team success, and a marketable star.
With that in mind, how do the Cavs stack up? They didn’t have what it took coming into the season to make it onto the list, or likely past the first cuts. Have things changed enough to make it next season or beyond? Let’s go one at a time.
First, the market. Cleveland is not in the bottom handful of markets in the league, but it’s certainly a smaller market without a lot of national draw. This factor gets teams like the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers onto the Christmas Day slate nearly every season. The Chicago Bulls have likewise made it onto the slate even when they were bad; it seems like something of a miss that the league finally supplanted them this year, when the Bulls are having their best season in a long time.
The Cavs will never reach this benchmark; if anything the Cleveland market is trending downwards, and if the league expands it will almost certainly add Seattle, pushing the Cavs even further down the list.
Secondly, teams make it due to team success. All but one of the ten teams made the playoffs last season, and the exception is a Golden State Warriors team that has been to the NBA Finals five times in the past seven years and is neck-and-neck with the Phoenix Suns for the best record in the league this season. Teams such as the Utah Jazz and Phoenix Suns made it onto the slate because of their recent team success.
This is the Cavs’ best path to making it onto the Christmas Day slate. They are currently one of the four best teams in the Eastern Conference according to team record, and by some advanced metrics have played the best of any East team thus far. If they win 48 games this season and pull off a playoff win, then they could put themselves on the radar enough to make the cut.
It’s probably a long shot for next season, but it’s their best shot. Looking down the line, the upside of this young core means it’s a great bet for this group to qualify based on team success in the years to come, even if it’s not by next year.
Finally, the best way to make it onto the Christmas Day slate is by star power. LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry (arguably the three biggest stars in the league, however you slice it) are all playing on Christmas (or would be if healthy). Giannis Antetokounmpo is the reigning Finals MVP. Luka Doncic and Trae Young are highly popular young stars.
This is the wild card for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Darius Garland is a dynamic scorer and passer, a point guard who does and will have the ball in his hands a lot. Evan Mobley is already a defensive monster and a budding offensive hub. Together, the two appear to be on a trajectory to stardom and success.
It’s hard to predict how marketable one or both of those players will be. Is Mobley a star on the level of Anthony Davis? Is Garland going to be named alongside Young or Ja Morant? If the Cavs win at the level they look capable of, and this group can make an impact in the playoffs, this looks like a possible path to Christmas Day as well.
So where does that leave us? The Cavs’ team success this season, plus their rising stars (shouts to Jarrett Allen, who is incredibly solid even if not a likely star) will net this team a much larger national television presence next season. It will probably take a whole other season and a couple of All-Star berths for Garland and/or Mobley to get this team in the mix for Christmas Day.
Two months ago, no one outside of Cleveland (and perhaps inside of it) would have expected this conversation. The lack of national television games hurt, but it was understood. This was a listless franchise trying desperately to fit a collection of young talent together. Well, the outside of the puzzle has been completed, and the inside is coming along apace.
When will we see the Cavs on Christmas Day? Not this year, and maybe not next year, but soon. This team is on the rise, and the NBA shold be ready to showcase one of their best teams before too long.