The Cleveland Cavaliers are heading into the 2025-26 season as one of the best teams in basketball. The NBA is treating them exactly like it too.
Shams Charania dropped the first little bits of the highly-anticipated schedule leaks. Thanks to the ESPN insider, everyone now knows who will be playing on Opening Night and Christmas Day.
The bad news for the Cavaliers is they will not be featured on the first night of the NBA calendar. Those spots belong to the Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder, Golden State Warriors, and Los Angeles Lakers. There is not a single Eastern Conference team in sight.
However, once Christmas Day hits, there was no way to keep the Cavaliers from a well-deserved spot. Cleveland will be on the road against the New York Knicks to start the slate of games scheduled for the holiday.
Cavaliers get their spot on Christmas Day — but one other thing is also clear
It is obvious that the Cavaliers will be respected as one of the top contenders heading into the 2025-26 season. Their matchup against the other prominent team in the Eastern Conference suggests as much.
However, one other aspect of this notably sticks out. Of the 10 teams playing on Christmas Day, the Cavaliers and Knicks are the only two from the East.
The Thunder, Rockets, Warriors, and Lakers got spots on both Opening Night and Christmas. The San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks, Minnesota Timberwolves, and Denver Nuggets joined the fray for the latter.
That leaves the conference as a whole quite underrepresented on these two pivotal days of the NBA calendar. In all fairness, that has been the general consensus surrounding the East in the lead-up to the start of the new season.
Apart from the Orlando Magic, not many other teams have snuck their way into conversation of contention to join the Cavaliers and Knicks this offseason. Clevelanders will be hoping that is exactly the case in 2025-26.
The goal is not to underestimate the rest of the teams who could challenge the Cavaliers for Eastern Conference supremacy. However, Cleveland fans would love to see their team firmly assert themselves into that spot.
NBA schedule makers are treating the Cavaliers like a team comfortably above its immediate competition. Hopefully for Cleveland, those people are right in their assessment.