Cavs guard Donovan Mitchell vs. the Orlando Magic. ESPN Cleveland/Madison Hayes
Game Night Observations: Mitchell's big night and the opportunity ahead
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Danny Cunningham covers the Cleveland Cavaliers for 850 ESPN Cleveland and TheLandOnDemand.comThe Cavaliers collected another win on Friday night, knocking off the Orlando Magic 107-96 at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
Friday night, at times, felt a little bit like the Cavaliers were playing with their food. It wasn’t until the third quarter that the Cavs really put their foot down and took control of the game.
There were two big factors as to why that happened.
The first was how well the Cavs played defensively. They held Orlando to just 17 points in the period, forced four turnovers, and allowed only two second chance points. Even the shots the Magic were making, for the most part, were difficult ones.
The other reason was the play, and leadership of Donovan Mitchell.
Mitchell was brilliant again for the Cavs on Friday night. He continues to be everything, and more than this franchise could have hoped for when he was acquired back in early September. He finished the night with 34 points (13 of them coming in the third quarter) on 12-of-21 shooting and 7-of-11 from deep. Those shooting numbers don’t fully tell how good Mitchell was, either, considering he missed his last five attempts from the field.
“Domination,” Cavs head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said of Mitchell’s play. “The ability to take over a game and put a team on his back. He felt that we needed — that this game was important. There was a little bit of a draw to us, and he knew, and his teammates knew he was capable. And he put us on his back.”
One of the things that makes the Cavs so dangerous is that Mitchell isn’t the only guy on the team that can take over a game offensively. Some nights, that’s the job of Darius Garland, it’s starting to become something second-year big man Evan Mobley can do more often, too. It’s also not as if when one of those guys has it going on the others are quiet, either. On Friday, Mobley had 19 points on just 10 shots and added in 13 rebounds. Garland scored 18 points and handed out six assists to go with it.
Friday night was Mitchell’s turn to carry the scoring burden.
More than just the scoring, Mitchell has been one of the vocal leaders on this Cavs team, too. It’s something that may have been missing before he arrived in a locker room full of quiet, mild-mannered guys. Mitchell has been the guy to speak up when the team has needed it this year.
“When you have someone who is willing to sacrifice of themselves, especially with the things he’s accomplished and achieved as an individual player, you're willing to listen, then when you watch someone who’s willing to sacrifice and who is as selfless and he is and who just wants to be a part of it and a part of winning and ingratiate himself in the group, who always has a positive message, it’s hard to ignore,” Bickerstaff said of Mitchell’s leadership. “And it’s in a way that it never feels like it’s a beat-down or an attack. Everybody understands that he’s just trying to help. It makes it easier, but that’s based on the relationships and the type of person that he is beforehand.”
Looking ahead
Friday night’s win starts a stretch for the Cavs that gives them an opportunity to create some space between themselves and the middle tier of the Eastern Conference. The Cavs are now 15-8 on the season and have a two-game lead on the Atlanta Hawks for third place in the Eastern Conference.
Over the month of December, the Cavs will spend much more time playing inside Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse than anywhere else. Of the team’s 15 games in the month, 10 of them are played at home. That’s pretty good news for a team that just moved to 10-1 at home on Friday night.
The better news may be the quality of opponent that Cavs will be facing. According to ESPN’s RPI, the Cavs have faced the ninth-toughest schedule in the NBA prior to Friday. Now, after beating the Magic, six of the next nine games for the Cavs will come against teams that entered play on Friday below .500 on the season.
While the Cavs may be less than three games clear of the fourth-place Indiana Pacers in the standings as things stand right now, there are plenty of advance metrics that point to Cleveland as not only in the top tier of Eastern Conference teams, but as a title contender.
The Cavs enter the weekend with the third-best net rating in the NBA, outscoring opponents by 7.1 points per 100 possessions. The only two teams they trail in that category are the Boston Celtics and the Phoenix Suns. Both of those teams are in first place in their respective conferences. After the win on Friday, the Cavs are now owners of the best defense in basketball. According to NBA.com, the Cavs are allowing 107.3 points per 100 possessions defensively, that’s fewer than every other team.
A standard that’s often set for championship level teams is having both an offense and a defense that ranks in the top 10 of the NBA. Obviously, the Cavaliers defense currently ranks first, while the team is currently seventh in offensive rating, at 114.4. As things stand right now, only two other teams, Phoenix and New Orleans, can join the Cavaliers as members of the top 10 in both categories.
One of the metrics that is highest on the Cavs is Basketball Reference’s Simple Rating System. That metric essentially takes how much a team outscores its opponents by while factoring in the strength of the schedule it faces. The Cavs entered play on Friday with the second-best mark in the league at 7.09 (for this, zero is considered average). The only team with a better mark is Boston with an SRS of 8.79.
When all of this is combined with the fact that the Cavs’ remaining schedule is considered by consensus to be one of the easiest remaining in all the NBA, signs are pointing to this team being able to collect not only home court in the first round of the playoffs, but the 3-seed at worst.
This isn’t to say that the Cavaliers should be considered true title contenders just yet, but it does say that they’re a team that needs to be taken seriously as a team that could be in that conversation when the year ends. In the first 23 games of the season, the Cavs went from a team that many considered to being on the playoff bubble to a team that most consider a real threat to the league’s superpowers.
Quick hits- The Cavs got Kevin Love back on the floor on Friday night. Love finished with his fourth double-double of the season, scoring 11 points and collecting 11 rebounds. Love had missed six of the last seven games for the Cavs while dealing with a fracture in his right thumb and an illness.
- “I thought he was really good,” Bickerstaff said of Love’s game on Friday. “He has an uncanny ability to get double-doubles, play the game with a banged up thumb, but was still in the mix of things, like those rebounds don’t come easy for him, he’s not just running around out-jumping people. He’s gotta grapple and wrestle and hold and scrap, and he was attentive. He went out with his purpose and his will to help us win.
- The win on Friday night moves the Cavs to 10-1 at home. It’s their best start at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse since starting 10-1 to begin the 2015-16 season. The 15-8 start overall is the best start for the team since the 2017-18 season the Cavaliers started off 23-8.
- The Cavs are next in action on Sunday night in New York against the Knicks. Sunday will be the second matchup between the two teams, the Cavaliers winning the first one 121-108 at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Oct. 30.
