The Cleveland Cavaliers haven’t just hit a speedbump; they’ve flown over the guardrails and are spiraling towards rock bottom. A 14-11 record doesn’t look as bad as this start to the season has felt. This team is at a crossroads — where their current adversity will either make or break them moving forward.
Kenny Atkinson is familiar with this challenge. He recently called back to his time as an assistant coach in Golden State when the Warriors won the title in 2022 after a difficult regular season.
“Everyone thinks it’s a smooth ride, but it definitely wasn’t smooth,” Atkinson said. “That year we won the championship, I think we had a stretch where we went 7-16, we lost 9-out-of-11 at one point, 7-of-8 [in a different stretch] — nothing was screaming championship that season, as a matter of fact, it was like ‘oh my gosh, this is falling apart.”
Atkinson is right. The Warriors’ path to the title was bumpy. They won just 53 games, posting one of the lowest win percentages of any champion in the shot clock era. In fact, only four teams have won the title with a regular-season win percentage below .65 since the 2000s. Three of the four have happened in the 2020s (Milwaukee, Denver and Golden State).
The Cavs currently have a win percentage of .56.
There are a few different ways you can look at this. A pessimist would say the Warriors are an outlier that shouldn’t be used as an example. A team featuring Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green deserves the benefit of the doubt — because a poor regular season from that group doesn’t make them any less dangerous in the playoffs.
Plenty of teams struggle in the regular season. Only a handful have ever gone on to win the title. It’s far, far more likely that a dominant regular-season team eventually wins the championship.
Still, recent NBA history has been increasingly unpredictable. The Indiana Pacers began last season 10-15 before coming within one game of winning the title. The 2023 Miami Heat crawled from the depths of the Play-In to compete in the NBA Finals. And of course, the Warriors won the entire thing after a slow start.
That’s because no two champions have the same story. Each path to the title is different. Learning how to overcome adversity and navigate difficult seasons is maybe the only trait that every championship team has in common.
“That’s where Steve [Kerr’s] experience and having been in so many different situations [helped],” Atkinson said of the 2022 season. “I feel like at this point in my career, I’m similar. I’ve seen how these seasons can go up and down and how they can change. I’ve been a lot more calm than if this were 10 years ago, when I was first coaching, I’d probably be a lunatic right now.”
The Cavs won’t get a do-over for the first 25 games of the season.
Thankfully, nothing they’ve done in these games has disqualified them from competing for the ultimate goal (yet). There is still time to turn this around. And while league history has rarely ever gone in their favor, there is at least some precedent for overcoming this level of adversity. Atkinson should be more equipped for this job than most, given his experience.
Now would be the time to start shifting momentum, with a week of winnable games on the horizon. The Cavs play Washington, Charlotte and Chicago (twice) for their next four games. It all has to start somewhere. Adversity can only build so much character before it starts to break you down.
