Wednesday night time’s showdown between the Oklahoma Metropolis Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers is chock stuffed with sufficient fascinating matchups and total basketball excellence to mark this as one of many season’s can’t-miss video games.
It additionally has the prospect to let maybe the league’s best-but-under-celebrated basketball group lastly get the shine it deserves. As a result of a win tonight over OKC may, hopefully permit the Cavs to show themselves in a season by which that ought to have already got been simply achieved.
The league ought to be previous the still-too-evolving realization that this Cleveland group is each bit as elite because the Thunder, the Celtics or anybody else on the market. They’re the true deal. Each bit as harmful and worthy of plaudits that their report 31-4 ought to have already foisted upon them.
This recreation alone ought to communicate to that.
When the Thunder and Cavaliers sq. off tonight, it will likely be the primary time in NBA historical past a group on a 15-game successful streak (Oklahoma Metropolis) faces a group on a 10-game successful streak (Cleveland).
It will likely be the primary inter-conference recreation in NBA historical past this deep right into a season that groups with successful percentages of .850 or increased play each other, and the primary time because the 1971-72 season a minimum of two groups have received 30 of their first 35 video games.
The Thunder are 11-0 towards the Japanese Convention this season. The Cavs are 10-0 versus the West.
The Thunder have the sport’s greatest protection. The Cavs have the very best offense.
This an enormous recreation between enormous groups — two enormous groups.
And but there appears, in each nook of the NBA, a lingering doubt. That is not true for the Thunder. However it’s for his or her opponent tonight.
The doubt isn’t of Cleveland’s excellent play, per se, however of their place as a real, do-doubt, holy-crap-they-scare-us NBA contender.
“Cleveland?” one Japanese Convention normal supervisor mused, when prodded concerning the Cavs being seen as a ferocious convention foe. “Nice season. Actually good group. Nice on each side of the ball. However are they quote-un-quote unbeatable? No.
“They don’t seem to be the Warmth once they had LeBron, Dwyane and Chris Bosh,” he mentioned. “They don’t seem to be the Kobe Lakers, or the Spurs, or Golden State when the Warriors received KD. They’re actually good. However they are not a group you see and suppose, ‘I do not see how we will beat them in a seven-game collection.'”
It is a view extensively shared on the market, the place in a single breadth these in NBA circles wish to reward Cleveland, and in one other they prefer to say they’re nonetheless not the Celtics — or, for that matter, the Thunder, who, not like Boston, are additionally not defending champions.
“I do not take the Cavs that severely,” one other NBA front-office supply mentioned. “Not that stage.”
There’s extra of that on the market, and the purpose has the identical by line: Nice story. Superb begin. However not one in all the groups to beat. Not a David, certain, but additionally no Goliath.
Maybe it is as a result of Cleveland has finished nothing with out LeBron James in its historical past, and with out him there his residual glow hasn’t correctly highlighted how good this group really performs. Perhaps it is as a result of they aren’t, in actual fact, the defending-champion Boston Celtics, nor the younger, attention-grabbing, deep-as-hell Thunder group they play Wednesday.
The Thunder, in any case, have the betting favourite for this 12 months’s Most Worthwhile Participant Award in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. They boast that greatest protection within the league, with an array of younger expertise and the bevy of property Basic Supervisor Sam Presti has collected by a near-perfect rebuild since pivoting away from Russell Westbrook and Paul George in 2019.
It is exhausting to not really feel the pull of a group bursting with younger expertise, atop the Western Convention, on this large roll, nonetheless ready — if and once they deem its even desired or essential — so as to add much more firepower to what’s already a rocketship.
However the Cavs aren’t precisely chopped liver, bereft of star energy. It is not as in the event that they’re simply strolling alongside leisurely by one other so-so NBA common season. They have been sensible, too.
Donovan Mitchell is, in actual fact, a famous person. He is averaging a minimum of 20 factors per recreation for the eighth straight season — his total profession. The opposite gamers to try this of their first eight NBA seasons this century is a brief listing: LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid and Carmelo Anthony.
Evan Mobley has unleashed a profession 12 months, and is without doubt one of the greatest defenders within the league. Kenny Atkinson, in his first 12 months because the Cavs head coach, appears like a head coach reborn after stints beneath Ty Lue in L.A. after which Steve Kerr in Golden State.
Each the Cavs and Thunder have prime 10 offenses and defenses, an indicator traditionally of an eventual championship group.
The Cavs could not have received final 12 months’s title or, just like the Thunder, this 12 months’s narrative.
However a win on Wednesday, and Cleveland could be on monitor for a 73-win season — on tempo to maybe tie the Warriors all-time wins mark.
That is a historic begin. This can be a historic match up.
And perhaps, as well, a Cavs win will lastly give Cleveland the respect they’ve already clearly earned.
