Were Cavs the best NBA team to miss playoffs in last decade?

It’s easy to get reductionistic in evaluating the Cavs or any other NBA team. How many wins did they have? Did they make the playoffs? Win a series? Win the title? Clearing one bar simply sets the expectations higher the next time around.

For the Cleveland Cavaliers, they just logged a fourth consecutive season in the lottery. They also doubled their win total from the previous season, from 22 to 44 wins. The Cavs finished eighth in the Eastern Conference and then lost both Play-in Tournament games to end up on the outside-looking-in of the playoffs.

The Cleveland Cavaliers were a really good team that missed the playoffs. Were they the best NBA team not to make the playoffs in the past decade?

The reality is that not all lottery teams are created equal. For example, if a team is in one conference where the final playoff team had 48 wins, and the next missed by a single game, and in the other conference the last playoff team had 40 wins and yet made the playoffs by a six-game margin, those “just-missed” teams can be wildly different. The Play-in Round muddies the water, but the point still stands.

We have to look deeper than “did they make the playoffs” and even a team’s basic win total to evaluate how good any one team is. Everyone who watched the Cavs last season knows they were good. How good were they? And were they among the best modern teams to miss out on the playoffs? Let’s take a closer look.