Yahoo Sports' 5 Most Interesting NBA Teams: The Cleveland Cavaliers

Before the start of the 2023-24 NBA season, I’m spending the week training the microscope on a handful of the most interesting teams in the NBA (to me, if not necessarily to anyone else). After stops in Oklahoma City, New Orleans and Philadelphia, we’re off to Ohio, a land for lovers, players and inventors of Superman alike:

As he sat there at the podium, basking in the afterglow of the greatest achievement of his professional basketball career, Nikola Jokić talked about how a team gets where it wants to go.

“If you want to be a success, you need a couple years,” he said after the Denver Nuggets won the 2023 NBA championship. “You need to be bad, then you need to be good. Then, when you’re good, you need to fail. And then, when you fail, you’re going to figure it out. I think experience is something that is not what happened to you; it’s what you’re going to do with what happened to you.”

It’s a familiar story, that hero’s-journey path to the promised land, going back to the chief creation myth of the modern era: Jordan’s Bulls needing to suffer at the hands of Cummings and Moncrief, Bird and McHale, and the Bad Boy Pistons before breaking through. The Cleveland Cavaliers are walking it now. The question: Can they speed-run it?

First: Be bad. Check! After LeBron James went west, the Cavs won 19, 19 and 22 games, with as many head coaches as three-game winning streaks (four) in that span. The benefit of all that bad-being? The high lottery picks that turned into point guard Darius Garland (fifth overall in 2019), defensive swingman Isaac Okoro (fifth in 2020) and futuristic big Evan Mobley (third in 2021).

Next: Be good. Check! Cleveland made a gargantuan 22-win improvement from 2020-21 to 2021-22, as Garland ascended to All-Star status, coach J.B. Bickerstaff zagged away from the league-wide infatuation with small-ball by playing huge — the 6-foot-11 Jarrett Allen at center, the 7-foot Mobley at power forward and 7-footer Lauri Markkanen at “small” forward — and reaping the benefits of all that size in the form of the NBA’s No. 6 defense. The Cavs shocked the league, sitting just two games out of first place in the East at the All-Star break before the accumulated weight of injuries — season-enders for Ricky Rubio and Collin Sexton, brutally timed ones for Allen, Mobley and Caris LeVert — dropped them into the play-in tournament. They’d fall twice, to the Hawks and Nets, missing out on the playoffs altogether.

One way to erase the bitter taste of that ending? Swooping in out of nowhere to snare All-Star point guard Donovan Mitchell out from under the New York Knicks’ noses, without giving up any of your young core players. (Say that five times fast.)

The former Utah Jazz star was brilliant in his first season in Cleveland, averaging a career-high 28.3 points per game and earning his first All-NBA selection after partnering with Garland to lift the Cavs to their first top-10 finish in offensive efficiency since LeBron’s departure. With the backcourt lighting up the scoreboard and the bigs clamping down on opposing offenses — nobody allowed fewer points per possession than the Cavs, as rising star Mobley placed third in Defensive Player of the Year voting — Cleveland posted the NBA’s second-best net rating behind only the Celtics and topped 50 wins and made the playoffs without LeBron for the first time since 1998 …

… and then the Knicks absolutely packed up the Cavs in the first round of the playoffs.

Mitchell Robinson, Josh Hart and Co. bulldozed Allen and Mobley on the glass; New York rebounded nearly 40% of its missed shots and scored 18.2 second-chance points per game. The Knicks took advantage of Cleveland lineups featuring multiple non-shooters — Allen and Mobley up front, the skittish Okoro, trick-or-treat options like Rubio, Cedi Osman and Danny Green — by packing the paint, taking away driving lanes and forcing Mitchell and Garland to play in traffic. When the star guards “shot like crap” and “played like s***,” Cleveland’s offense tanked, producing four of its worst 15 performances of the entire season as New York ended its season in five.

Fail. Check.

What did the Cavs learn about themselves in the course of producing a regular-season monster that petered out in the playoffs? What did the self-scout suggest they were lacking? How do you bounce back from that disappointment, and how do you ensure that the lights don’t seem so bright next time?

One answer: bring in some guys who can shoot those lights out.

Like Max Strus, who has shot 37.6% from 3-point range on more than nine attempts per 36 minutes over the past two seasons, and whom Cleveland paid $63 million over four years to come over from the conference champion Miami Heat and ensure you can’t sag off the Cavs’ small forward anymore. And Georges Niang, a 6-8 stretch-4 who has made more than 40% of his triples in each of the last four seasons for playoff teams in Utah and Philadelphia — and who could play alongside either Allen or Mobley, giving Bickerstaff a viable commodity if he feels he needs to split up his two bigs in search of more shooting and spacing. And reserve guard Ty Jerome, who shot 42% from deep two seasons ago and 39% last year, and who might play a larger role than initially anticipated with Rubio away from the team for mental health reasons. (And maybe second-round pick Emoni Bates, a 19-year-old former prep phenom who likely starts at the bottom of the perimeter pecking order, but whose physical tools and 9-for-20 mark from distance in preseason certainly intrigue.)

Adding more high-end shooters capable of knocking down both standstill and on-the-move jumpers could help create an even more “dynamic” Cavaliers offense. It could also lead to a minutes crunch — particularly for Okoro, who’s now a certified offensive playoff liability the team cannot afford but who’s also still Cleveland’s top defensive option against elite perimeter players. That could prove a tough circle for Bickerstaff and his assistants to square against opponents that feature both top defenses and dangerous wing scorers … like, y’know, the best teams in the East.

Cleveland’s likeliest path to toppling those powers? A leap from Mobley, who’s been an impact defender since Day 1 and who showed signs of offensive growth in the second half of last season before New York’s bigs muscled him into a quiet 9.8 points on 9.6 field-goal attempts per game in the playoffs. How does he respond to that first brush with postseason failure? Can he assume a larger offensive role — as a connective-tissue, release-valve playmaker when defenses trap Mitchell or Garland, and as someone capable of making enough corner 3s to punish opponents who pack the paint — while maintaining his elite defense across positions (including, perhaps, as the on-ball option against those high-scoring wings)?

We might not see quite as much positional versatility from Mobley out of the gate, if he winds up having to take on more of the center duties while Allen recuperates from a bone bruise in his left ankle that could sideline him for the start of the season. Reserve centers Damian Jones and the somehow-back-in-Cleveland Tristan Thompson should get a longer look, too — as could power forward Dean Wade, who struggled mightily with a shoulder injury last season but has looked great in the preseason.

Allen’s absence creates an interesting Catch-22 for the Cavs. If things look a little too good with Mobley at the 5, more shooters on the wings and Cleveland lighting it up, questions about the long-term viability of the two-big construction could get even louder. And on the flip side, if the Cavs get off to a rocky start and struggle, the other big question hanging over the club — Mitchell demurring on the notion of a contract extension with two guaranteed years left on his current deal (understandable, considering he stands to make much more money by waiting) and the persistent rumblings about those tethers to New York — could start to get louder, too.

The best way to turn down the volume on that chatter, of course, is to win — to continue the climb that Cleveland has been on for the past three seasons and cement itself as the clear No. 3 in the East behind the Boston-Milwaukee diptych (and maybe even vie for the top spot?); to enter the postseason with a wider variety of answers on both ends of the court and advance in the playoffs. The Cavs have been bad, they’ve been good, and they’ve failed. Now, it’s time for them to figure it out.