Believe it or not: The Cavaliers are one of the most dominant teams we’ve ever seen

If you’re looking for accuracy, one pretty good place to look is the greatest shooter of all time.

“You’re as good as your record says you are,” Stephen Curry said. “So they’re pretty damn good right now.”

“They” are the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Curry said that on Nov. 8, after watching them drop 83 points on his Warriors’ heads in a half en route to a blowout win. Nearly two months later, what the record’s saying is that “pretty damn good” might be a galactic understatement.

The Cavs come into Friday’s matchup with the Mavericks riding an eight-game winning streak, with every victory coming by double digits. They just went 12-1 in December, blowing opponents’ doors off by a league-high 15.2 points per 100 possessions.

They enter Dallas at 29-4 — 29-4! — which makes them just the 12th team ever to start a season with 29 wins in 33 tries. Six of the first 11 went on to win the NBA title; Curry’s 2015-16 Warriors started 31-2, won an NBA-record 73 games, and came up one win short in one of the greatest NBA Finals of all time.

After missing a combined 89 games last season, the core four of Donovan Mitchell, Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen and Darius Garland have missed a total of four thus far this season; turns out having all your best dudes helps a lot. New head coach Kenny Atkinson has helped a lot, too, both in terms of how he’s managed staggering the core four — he’s largely paired Mitchell with Mobley and Garland with Allen, and Cleveland’s been excellent in both alignments — and in how he’s juiced the Cavaliers’ attack.

Cleveland’s winning formula

The Cavs are playing faster, generating more possessions (eighth in pace this season, up from 24th last season) and getting shots up more quickly (38.9% of their attempts have come in the first nine seconds of the shot clock, up from 32.3% last season). That’s held true even after giving up a bucket; they’ve shaved more than a second off of their average time-to-shot following a made basket, according to Inpredictable, a commitment to applying pressure that can leave opponents feeling overwhelmed. (“Every coach’s nightmare,” Atkinson said. “Getting dinged in transition.”)

A more diversified offense that leverages Mobley as a half-court hub and gets the guards off the ball more often has decreased Cleveland’s reliance on Mitchell’s shot creation. Throughout his career, Mitchell’s been the headliner, the sun at the center of his team’s solar system. It’s been a successful approach, producing five All-Star selections, an All-NBA nod and seven straight playoff berths.

It’s also one that demands a ton of a player who’s already nearing 20,000 career minutes, who’s got the sixth-highest usage rate in the NBA since entering the league in 2017, and who’s battled groin, hamstring, knee and calf issues over the past two seasons. Atkinson’s plan to bring Mobley and Garland closer to the center of the frame was also aimed at balancing Mitchell’s short-term productivity and long-haul freshness. So far, so good. Mitchell’s minutes, field-goal attempts, touches, time of possession and usage rate are all down, while his per-possession production has stayed steady; the share of his baskets that have been assisted, as opposed to self-created, is at an all-time high.

Mitchell and Garland spending more time off the ball has fostered a more egalitarian attack. This isn’t stand-up or a one-man show; it’s more like improv, a collaborative effort marked by a feeling of fresh possibility in which one actor builds on what another establishes, and everyone gets to score:

“The actions, the spacing, the way we’re moving, our pace,” Mitchell recently told reporters. “It’s like: It’s not predictable. You never know where each guy’s going to be.”

Even those bullish on the Cavs before the season, though, likely didn’t expect them to open it performing like one of the most dominant teams we’ve ever seen. That sounds like hyperbole; somehow, it isn’t. Consider:

• The Cavs have won their 29 games by an average of 11.88 points, which would be the fifth-highest average margin of victory in NBA history, according to Stathead. The only teams to finish a season with a higher average margin: the 1972 Lakers, the 1971 Bucks and the 1996 Bulls. They all won the NBA title.

• Simple rating system, which accounts for a team’s point differential and strength of schedule, pegs the Cavs as one of the dozen strongest teams in league history. Nine of the 11 teams that have finished a season with a higher SRS than Cleveland’s went to the NBA Finals; eight won.

• The Cavs aren’t just leading the NBA in points scored per possession; according to Jared Dubin’s adjusted efficiency metric, Cleveland has the third most efficient offense since the ABA-NBA merger in 1976.

• Because they also remain excellent on defense — tied with the Timberwolves for sixth in defensive efficiency, according to Cleaning the Glass — the Cavs enter Friday with an era-adjusted scoring margin of plus-10.4 points-per-100 above league average, according to Dubin. Only eight teams since the merger have finished with a margin higher than 10. Six of them won the title.

“They have the best record in the NBA, they have the No. 1 offense in the NBA, and no one seems to be able to stop that team,” Nuggets head coach Michael Malone told reporters after Cleveland buried Denver beneath a 149-point Cavalanche. “… Really, when you play them, there is no margin for error.”

That’s due in large part to a combination of sure-handed play and sharpshooting.

For all the crispness of the ball movement in Atkinson’s cutting-heavy attack, Cleveland actually ranks just 28th in the NBA in total passes per game. When you don’t put the ball in the air a ton, and when the quarterbacks tasked with shepherding the offense — Garland, Mitchell and increasingly Mobley in the starting unit, plus Ty Jerome and Caris LeVert off the bench — take good care of it, you tend to hang on to it. After finishing 17th in turnover rate last season, this year’s Cavs have climbed to third in how rarely they cough the ball up.

Not turning the ball over means more opportunities to get shots up. And on a roster loaded with knock-down shooters, that’s a recipe for awfully long nights for opposing defenses.

Seven Cavaliers are hitting at least 40% of their triples. That doesn’t include Sam Merrill, who shot 40% last season; Dean Wade, who shot 39% last season; Georges Niang, hitting 38% this season; and the just-returned Max Strus, a career 36.4% shooter on more than six attempts per game. After plenty of hectoring from pundits over his first two seasons, Mobley has stretched his game to the perimeter; he led the NBA in 3-point accuracy in December, shooting 52.4% from deep while taking 3.5 triples per game. (Allen, the only member of the Cavs rotation who doesn’t take 3s, has sharpened himself into an ideal implement on the interior, shooting nearly 70% on 2-point shots and serving as one of the NBA’s most effective high-volume pick-and-roll finishers.)

As a team, Cleveland is shooting a blistering 40.7% from 3-point land — which not only leads the NBA, but would be tied for the fifth-best mark in NBA history — and they’re leaning even further into that identity as the season goes on, increasing their long-range volume month over month. The Celtics are on pace to become the first NBA team ever to take more than half of their shots from 3-point range; in December, 3s accounted for 49.5% of Cleveland’s attempts.

And — as was the case with the Celtics when they laid out the blueprint last season, and as has been the case with the Knicks since pairing Karl-Anthony Towns with Jalen Brunson to supercharge their offense — the hidden value of all that shooting emerges when Cleveland exploits it to get into the paint.

After finishing 17th in drives per game last season, the Cavs sit fourth this season, with Garland and Mitchell knifing to generate either point-blank looks for themselves or kickouts to all those gunners. Cleveland’s sixth in catch-and-shoot points per game; only the Knicks and Celtics produce more points per possession on spot-up shots.

“They’re so intentional about the extra pass,” Draymond Green told reporters after former Warriors assistant Atkinson’s new team thumped Golden State in November. “And this is a staple for us: to drive, swing, swing. That’s what we preached for years, and they diced us up with it.”

Pair elite turnover avoidance with elite shooting, and you’re going to have a consistently high offensive floor. The Cavs have only been held under one point per possession once — in their Nov. 29 loss to Atlanta — and have posted a below-league-average offensive rating just five times in 33 games.

What makes them even more dangerous, though, is that they can combine that offensive excellence with 48 minutes of elite rim protection. Among 126 players to defend at least 75 shots at the basket this season, Allen ranks seventh in defensive field goal percentage (50.6%), Mobley ranks 31st (56.5%) … and über-3-and-D glue guy Wade ranks 10th, just ahead of Brook Lopez and Daniel Gafford.

Can the Cavs win it all?

So: We have a team with an elite offense that bombs away, hammers the paint and posts 50/40/78 shooting splits as a team; an excellent defense that can clamp down by playing things straight and junk up the game when necessary; that wins the possession battle most nights thanks to top-five-ish marks in both preventing and generating turnovers; and has four players who, even if they don’t all make the All-Star team, all have pretty legit cases.

That sounds like a really, really hard team to beat.

“Against teams as good as Cleveland, you have to play close to perfect basketball,” Lakers head coach JJ Redick said after a loss on New Year’s Eve. “They’re not going to let you beat them. They’re not going to beat themselves. They really believe in what they’re doing.”

All that’s left, then, is convincing everybody else.

Maybe you look at Cleveland’s roster and see the need for a big wing yearning to be filled by someone like, say, Herb Jones, Cam Johnson or (as I recently pitched on The Big Number) Jimmy Butler. A bright-eyed optimist might submit that a platoon of Wade — a 6-foot-10 Swiss Army knife who fits neatly at power forward, small-ball 5 or big-ball 3 — LeVert, Strus and Isaac Okoro gives Atkinson enough options to solve postseason problems on the perimeter.

Skeptics will point to Cleveland fattening up on a friendly early slate. The Cavs rank 29th in strength of schedule thus far, according to Basketball Reference, Dunks and Threes and ESPN. They’ve also benefitted from some good fortune in catching opponents at less than full strength along the way; over the past month, they’ve gotten the Celtics without Jaylen Brown or Derrick White, the Bucks without Damian Lillard, the 76ers without Joel Embiid and the Nuggets without Aaron Gordon. Will they fare as well against the East’s second-toughest remaining schedule?

There’s also the fact that Cleveland’s not the hands-down bully on the block this season. Remember those gaudy margin-of-victory and simple-rating-system numbers from earlier? The Thunder — tops in the West, now 28-5 heading into their own big Friday showdown with New York — actually rank ahead of the Cavs on both of those all-time lists. By Taylor Snarr’s adjusted metrics, which factor in the quality of opponents you’ve faced, Cleveland still profiles as a step below both OKC and Boston, despite its 4.5-game lead over the C’s in the standings.

Most of all: It’s tough to shake memories of watching the Cavs get manhandled by the Knicks in 2023, or barely sputtering past the Magic before getting rinsed by Boston last season. Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Co. bore the burden of proof until they broke through; the Cavs, like every other team on its own hero’s journey, will face the same scrutiny and suspicion until they do it, too, no matter how many points they pile up along the way.

“Ultimately, we’ll judge [the offense] by how it transfers to the playoffs,” Atkinson recently told reporters.

Until we get there, all we can do is evaluate what we see — which is a team that has gone 12-4 against .500-or-better teams, 9-0 against the Western Conference and 5-1 against teams with a top-10 net rating. If you’re as good as your record says you are, then we have to conclude that the Cavs — a team that just keeps kicking everyone’s ass — is also one capable of winning the whole thing.