The Cleveland Cavaliers are having a great season. A wobbly January gave way to seven-straight wins in February despite a grueling travel schedule, and the Cavs are right in the thick of the race in the Eastern Conference. This is the best basketball team Cleveland has had since LeBron James was in town.
With one game left against the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday night, the Cavaliers are currently 38-22, good for fourth in the Western Conference. Two seasons after winning just 22 games, and a year after missing the playoffs entirely, the Cavs look poised to end that playoff drought and even host a first-round series.
Power Rankings around the league generally agree with this sentiment: the Cavaliers are a really good team, but they’re not elite. NBA.com ranked Cleveland fifth in the league, as did The Athletic. CBS placed them as high as third. We placed them third in the East earlier this week.
The Cleveland Cavaliers are a really good team, but are they actually the best?
What if the Cavs aren’t just “really good”, though? What if there was a compelling and relatively easy case to make that the Cleveland Cavaliers are actually the best team in the entire league? Let’s look at three key pieces of evidence that suggest the Cavs are not just good, but great.
The Cavaliers have the league’s best defense
The bedrock of being an elite team is being elite at one end of the floor. The Cavaliers have that box checked, as they have the best defense in the entire NBA. The combination of Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen is the best defensive frontcourt in the NBA, and Isaac Okoro is among the best point-of-attack defenders out there.
The Cavs absolutely smother opponents. They have held their opponents to under a point per possession 13 times this season; the second-place Philadelphia 76ers have done so 10 times. To switch to volume, the Cavs have held their opponent under 100 points a whopping 19 times; the Miami Heat are next at just 12.
Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland aren’t complete turnstiles on defense, but they are certainly the weak spot of the defense. The Cavs lean into this, inviting opponents to drive into the paint. They give up the sixth-highest percentage of shots at the rim, but hold opponents to the second-lowest percentage at the rim at just 66.1 percent. They don’t mind if opponents knife into the paint, because Mobley and Allen are such potent forces inside.
The Cavs essentially do everything well defensively. They rank in the Top-10 in all four of the Defensive Four Factors: Opponent shooting (effective field goal percentage), turnover percentage, defensive rebounding and fouling; the Cavaliers don’t have a weak spot. That makes them the most formidable defensive team in the NBA.
The Cavaliers are dominating the advanced metrics
By pure record, the Cavaliers are the fifth-best team in the NBA. But peel back the layers even a little, and it soon becomes apparent that they have performed even better than that over the course of the season.
By net rating, the Cavs have been the second-best team in the NBA this season, just a sliver behind the Boston Celtics. SRS, which factors strength of schedule into the equation, likewise places the Cavaliers at second; same thing with FiveThirtyEight’s Elo rating, and Cleaning the Glass’s point differential.
Estimated Plus-Minus, one of the best all-in-one metrics available, places the Cavaliers first in the league with an adjusted net rating of +6.0, in a virtual tie with the Celtics. The Cavs have been playing their best basketball recently as well, as they are first in net rating since the beginning of February.
To sum all of that up, the Cavaliers are top-2 in nearly every major team metric out there, and are first over the past few weeks. This is a team that is performing as well as any team out there, with more still to offer.
The Cavaliers have a number of subjective advantages
In addition to the objective numbers playing in their favor, like advanced metrics and defensive numbers, there are a number of more subjective arguments to make for the Cavs being the best team in the entire league.
First, they have been hit by injury more than the other top teams. Per Man Games Lost, they have had the third-most games lost to injury this season in the entire league, behind only the Orlando Magic and Miami Heat (what’s going on in Florida?). That’s significantly more than the Philadelphia 76ers and Boston Celtics, and ahead of the Milwaukee Bucks and Denver Nuggets as well:
NBA injury plot. Games missed by injured players and health protocols versus team wins. Bubble size represents cumulative quality of players lost for games (Lost-vorp metric) https://t.co/dktmUmt2q4 pic.twitter.com/IiYiShEFPE
— Man Games Lost NBA (@ManGamesLostNBA) February 10, 2023
Secondly, they are an incredibly deep team. Their starting lineup is as good as anyone in the league — it ranks ninth in net rating among all high-minute groups, and in the last 15 games it’s the best lineup in the entire league. Then you add in bench players like Ricky Rubio, Caris LeVert, Danny Green and Dean Wade. Oh, and Cedi Osman and Raul Neto. Lamar Stevens and Kevin Love aren’t even in the rotation!
The Cleveland Cavaliers might not be the best team in the NBA. They may be the second-best or even the fifth-best. What is clear is that this team is not a fluke; they have handled opponents all season long, they are both star-laden and deep, and they have a theory on both ends of the court. And they just might actually be the best team in the NBA.