The poet Hanif Abdurraqib opens There’s Always This Year – his 2024 volume on the Cleveland Cavaliers, basketball and Ohio – with a meditation on the shared pain of Cavs fans before the arrival of LeBron James, and the unfettered joy he delivered with the 2016 NBA championship:
You are putting your hand into my open palm, and I am resting my one free hand atop yours, and I would like to commiserate here and now, about our enemies.
The enemies Abdurraqib speaks of are all who refuse to share in Cavs fans’ lament: a lifetime steeped in winless pain. The 2016 chip brought salvation, a religious nomenclature Abdurraqib uses throughout his memoir on the Cavs. When LeBron departed for Los Angeles in 2018, it felt like Cleveland had been cast back to the beginning of a parable. This season, they own the best record in the NBA and are back in championship contention. This iteration doesn’t have the best overall player of all time, LeBron, as their heliocentric savior. Instead, they have a talented, cohesive team of two-way players and, entering Wednesday night’s game at Miami, a 37-9 record. As they return to the class of true contenders, it begs a more vital question: can they really win it all?
For Cavs fans, losing has been a central part of the experience. Founded in 1970, the organization has been around for 54 years with the lone championship to their credit. It took 46 years to get there. So what now? For one, the pressure to finally win the first one is extinguished, thanks to LeBron fulfilling his prodigal son destiny. This year’s Cavs are a young roster with an average age of 26.9 years, suggesting a four- to five-year window to win another. They’ve already generated strong playoff experience, too, having reached the postseason the past two years with a conference semi-finals appearance in 2024. This makes it all the more impressive that they could potentially win 70 games while playing two traditional bigs in the frontcourt and an undersized backcourt, which is antithetical to where the NBA is trending. Abdurraqib defines his fandom as having “spent enough time aligned with both religion and sports to know there is no gospel richer than the gospel of suffering”; this religious verbiage conjures images of The Decision, pale faces burning James jerseys in 2010, “We Are All Witnesses” white-washed off walls, Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s letter, Anthony Bennett’s squander, Kyrie Irving’s exodus, followed by LeBron’s (again). Only Egypt has seen more plagues.
This season, the Cavs have become a juggernaut in East, running out to the best record and top offensive rating (121.3) while second in net rating (9.1). In the age of advanced analytics, they lead in categories like assist-to-turnover ratio (2.22), effective field-goal percentage (58.7) and true shooting perfcentage (61.6). The offense has been torrid from jump, led by the backcourt of Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garand, the frontcourt of Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, and the tutelage of first-year head coach Kenny Atkinson. Unlike the championship that was won squarely on the back of LeBron’s greatness, this Cavs team is just that: a team. They’re one of the finest exemplars of the modern pace-and-space era, currently fifth in three-point attempts per game (41) and second in makes (16.3), good for a league-best 39.8% from the perimeter. They rarely go five-out – what’s become a staple of present-day basketball – relying on a 10-man rotation with an arsenal of three-and-D players like Max Strus, Dean Wade, Isaac Okoro, Georges Niang and NBA sixth man of the year candidate Caris LeVert.
How did this particular Cavs team form? After LeBron’s post-championship departure in 2018, the Cavs missed the playoffs four years in a row. However, they didn’t let a decade-long “rebuild” gestate. They drafted to compete sooner rather than later. In 2019, they used the fifth overall pick on Garland, targeting him as their point guard of the future, just as they’d previously done with Kyrie Irving in 2011. Then they selected Mobley with the third pick in 2021. And. Here. We. Go.
It’s a new day in Ohio. While this roster is stacked with four potential All-Stars, there is no obviously MVP candidate, much less a LeBron, in the starting lineup. Mitchell is the closest thing to it. Acquired for a king’s ransom from the Utah Jazz in 2022, the current All-Star starter isn’t even having his best season. Here’s where the critics have a point. Every team that has won a championship in the modern era, including the Cavs in 2016, has had a generational superstar on their roster. Cavs supporters will counter that this team mirrors the 2004 Detroit Pistons, a group of All-Star…
The Guardian
