Three weeks into the 2024-25 season, the Cleveland Cavaliers still haven’t lost a basketball game. They’re on a historic run to begin this season, and it has a lot of people wondering if this team has been undervalued in the title-contention conversation. We also have the second annual In-Season Tournament, a.k.a. The NBA Cup, beginning this week. There’s a lot to dive into, especially with the NBA Stock Report. Let’s get to it.
Here’s your latest NBA Rewind!
Stock Report extended
We’re into Week 3 for our NBA Stock Report to let you know who is heading in the right and wrong directions. The East is struggling, the Nuggets are on fire and we’re seeing a bunch of teams suffer through injuries right now. Let’s take the temperature of the NBA Market with the latest trends.
📈 Cleveland Cavaliers (11-0). The Cavs faced a big test at 9-0 on Friday night with the hot Golden State Warriors coming to town. Winning that one might make people sit up and pay attention. The Cavs were up 41 at halftime. They went on to beat Brooklyn to push their record to 11-0 to begin the season. It’s the best start for this franchise in its history. They had never started 10-0 before. The best they did was starting 9-1 in both 1976 and 2016. The 1976-77 Cavs ended up just 43-39 on the season, but the 2016-17 Cavs went 51-31 before losing in the NBA Finals. The Cavs are historically shredding opposing defenses right now, and their defense hasn’t lost a step. More about them below.
GO DEEPER
Harper: The Cavs are off to a franchise-best start. Are they for real?
📉 The East. Everybody not named Cleveland (11-0) or Boston (9-2) is having a rough go of it. The Indiana Pacers (5-5) are the only other East team without a losing record. They’re third in the conference but would be 11th in the West. We all knew there would be a gulf between the East and the West in terms of wins and quality of teams. The East is very top-heavy. However, two teams (Milwaukee and Philadelphia) were expected to be near the top of the East, and they’ve both been abysmal. The Sixers can at least blame injuries for their 2-7 start. The Bucks are missing Khris Middleton, but that’s no excuse for starting 2-8.
📈 Denver Nuggets (7-3). Remember the panic we had for the Nuggets in the first week? Definitely not you and me. Just the other people who were panicking. You shouldn’t look for any evidence that we panicked. Well, the Nuggets have won five straight games, and Nikola Jokić is destroying everybody. Let’s take out the first game of the season in which he only had a 16-point, 13-assist, 12-rebound triple-double in a loss to the Thunder. His next nine games have him averaging 31.2 points, 13.9 rebounds and 11.6 assists while shooting 57.0 percent from the field, 58.3 percent from 3 and 84.8 percent from the line.
📉 New York Knicks (4-5). The Knicks are just 1-3 this week, and, while their offense has been good, their defense has been bad. Tom Thibodeau has almost no bench to call on right now. They avoided a winless week by beating the Bucks, but they also lost to the Hawks this week.
📈 NBA Beef. The Bucks looked like they might finally reverse their bad fortune with a win over the Celtics yesterday. They were up 17 in the second quarter and 11 at halftime. They ended up losing 113-107 despite 43 points from Giannis Antetokounmpo. There was one play in the second quarter when Giannis caught Jaylen Brown with an elbow, and it was called an offensive foul. Giannis held out his hand as a “no hard feelings” gesture before this happened.
This caused Brown to call Giannis “a child” when asked about this moment after the game. This also could be symbolic of the support Giannis has shown his last three coaches.
📈 Jalen Green revenge. Speaking of beef, Jalen Green was the second pick behind Cade Cunningham in the 2021 NBA Draft. Green has since talked about not wanting to be in Detroit, and he seems pretty happy in Houston. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some drama between him and the Pistons big guard. After Amen Thompson picked Cunningham clean yesterday, Green detonated on him.
My goodness! I wonder if Cunningham tapping Green’s face after a dunk in high school has been on Jalen’s mind at all? 👀
Big Story: The Cavs can’t lose
The Cavs are just the 12th team in NBA history to start the season 11-0. Three of those 12 teams (1964-65 Celtics, 1993-94 Rockets, 1996-97 Bulls) won the NBA championship. Two other teams (1957-58 Celtics and 2015-16 Warriors) made the NBA Finals. A hot start doesn’t mean everything in the long campaign of a grueling marathon, but the Cavaliers have everything to be excited about.
Cleveland is currently on pace to have the second-most efficient offense in NBA history behind last season’s Celtics. And, when you make the comparison of each team’s respective dominance (namely the offensive production and the team defense) there are a lot of encouraging things to take from the Cavs through the first 11 games. If you want to try to poke holes in this, you can’t really point to the schedule. They’ve beaten enough good teams (or supposedly good teams, Milwaukee) during this start for that to be a moot point.
GO DEEPER
Steve Kerr believes Kenny Atkinson has made Cavs ‘clearly one of the best teams in the league’
Maybe the two most important parts of this have been the play of Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobley. Mitchell is barely surpassing the 30-minutes-per-game mark this season, just clearing it after Saturday’s win over Brooklyn, and now sits at 30.3 minutes per night. This is what I wrote about Mitchell’s play so far after Friday night:
“Mitchell is averaging 22.6 points, 4.1 assists, 3.2 rebounds and is putting up 47.2/38.5/82.4 shooting splits in 29.9 minutes per game.
The five-time All-Star played in only 55 games last season, but let’s compare it to his 2022-23 campaign, which ended with him being named All-NBA Second-Team. That season, Mitchell averaged 28.3-4.4-4.3 in 35.8 minutes per night. He had 48.4/38.6/86.7 shooting splits, which are very comparable to what we’re seeing right now. His usage rate is actually higher now at 30.8 percent compared to 30.1 percent two seasons ago. The Cavs are getting relatively the same production out of him, but they don’t even need him for 30 minutes a night. If this can keep his legs fresh and himself relatively injury-free with the lesser workload, then maybe that saves him for the playoffs.”
What Mitchell has done in Kenny Atkinson’s system so far has been tremendous. It’s way too early, but it has him on track for another All-NBA appearance. Maybe he’ll be joined by Mobley? Mobley has been a monster on defense, and surprisingly even better than what we saw the last two seasons. Offensively, the Cavs are running a lot more through him, and giving him a much greater responsibility. After Friday night, this is what I said about Mobley:
“The 23-year-old is also not playing even 30 minutes per game, clocking in at 29.3 per night. Mobley’s scoring rate is up 1.6 points per game from last year despite him playing 1.3 fewer minutes. However, his usage rate has jumped from 20.6 percent last season to 24.3 percent this season. It’s by far the highest mark of his career. Atkinson is trusting Mobley with a much higher role in the offense, and we haven’t seen a significant drop in his efficiency. Combine that with the smothering defense that has somehow gotten even better than it was before, and you have a nearly complete modern big man. In fact, maybe those Victor Wembanyama DPOY predictions were a year too early with how Mobley could end up if this keeps going.”
We’re headed toward a really fun, special season from the Cavs. But people outside of Cleveland will be hesitant to embrace them as a true contender until we see how it looks in the playoffs and if they match up against the Celtics. Their next four games are at Chicago, at Philadelphia, home to Chicago, and home to Charlotte. They’re in Boston on Nov. 19. Cleveland has a chance to go into that showdown at 15-0. Only the 1994 Rockets (champs) and 2016 Warriors (runner-ups) have started 15-0.
The Week Ahead: The NBA Cup begins!
Remember the In-Season Tournament from last season? Those courts that assaulted the rods and cones in your eyes, and the format the players still didn’t seem to understand until we got to single elimination? Well, it’s back, it starts Tuesday, and it has a cool new name — The NBA Cup! Of course, it has a sponsor (Emirates)! Before we get into what the start of the NBA Cup looks like on Tuesday, let’s answer a couple of questions by having me talk to myself.
So, when exactly is the NBA Cup? Every Tuesday and Friday between Nov. 12 and Dec. 3 will be the NBA Cup Group Play action. You’ll know it’s an NBA Cup night by the special courts we’re seeing just for these games. To break it down completely, it’s the next four Tuesdays and the next three Fridays. Then, we’ll have the tournament portion of the NBA Cup happening Dec. 10 and 11.
The NBA Cup heads to Las Vegas again on Dec. 14 with the NBA Cup championship on Dec. 17. Oh, just a reminder the NBA Cup champ gets a banner and a trophy, and each player on the roster grabs $500,000 for winning it all.
Who won it last year? The Los Angeles Lakers! They beat the Indiana Pacers in the championship in Vegas. It was a pretty fun run by both teams with LeBron James taking home the In-Season Tournament MVP. Yes, that’s a real award! The media votes on the tournament MVP and an All-Tournament team.
And how does it work? We have six groups of five teams each. Three groups in the East. Three groups in the West. Each team will play four games within their group. The winner of each group will advance, as well as one wild card team from each conference. Tiebreakers will depend on head-to-head within group play and point differential as the first two. So, when you see teams running up the score at the end of these group play games, it’s actually what you’re supposed to do.
That’s eight teams advancing to the knockout tournament portion of the NBA Cup. And, yes, all of these NBA Cup games count for regular-season standings.
What are the groups again? I’m so glad you asked!
- East A: Knicks, Nets, Magic, 76ers, Hornets
- East B: Bucks, Pacers, Heat, Raptors, Pistons
- East C: Celtics, Bulls, Cavaliers, Hawks, Wizards
- West A: Wolves, Clippers, Kings, Rockets, Blazers
- West B: Thunder, Suns, Lakers, Jazz, Spurs
- West C: Nuggets, Mavericks, Pelicans, Warriors, Grizzlies
You said the bad courts are coming back? You fool! I never said that. There are different courts for the NBA Cup, but they won’t be the bizarre runway design from last season that was accosting your eyes with rabid color choices. This year’s court designs will feature three concentric circles that seem a lot calmer than what we were attacked with last season.
There are still plenty of opportunities for them to burn your eyes out, but for the most part, I think we’re in the clear.
What are we looking at for Tuesday’s action? NBA Cup Group Play action tips off Tuesday with eight games. We’ve got Hawks at Celtics (green court), Heat at Pistons (blue court), Hornets at Magic (gray court), Knicks at Sixers (blue court), Raptors at Bucks (surprisingly blue court), Suns at Jazz (gray court), Mavericks at Warriors (gray court) and Wolves at Blazers (surprisingly gray court). I think the Celtics’ green court could be disorienting, and the gray courts are going to make you feel like you’re watching a post-apocalyptic basketball video game.
What’s your prediction for the whole thing? Let’s get to the nitty-gritty of it all! I’ll pick the Knicks, Pacers and Celtics to win their respective groups with the Cavs grabbing the wild card. I’ll take the Kings, Lakers and Warriors winning their respective groups with the Mavericks as the wild card in the West. I’ll take the Lakers over the Kings and the Celtics over the Pacers in the semifinals. Then, give me the Lakers over the Celtics for the NBA Cup title. I’ve only known the Lakers to be NBA Cup champions, so I’ll pick them until someone else wins it.
(Top photo of Darius Garland: Jason Miller / Getty Images)