Wednesday night’s showdown between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Cleveland Cavaliers is packed with enough fascinating matchups and all-around basketball excellence to mark it as one of the must-see games of the season.
It also has a chance to allow perhaps the league’s best but least celebrated basketball team to finally get the shine it deserves. Because a win over OKC could, hopefully, allow the Cavs to prove themselves in a season where that should have already been easily accomplished.
The league should be over the still-evolving understanding that this Cleveland team is as elite as the Thunder, Celtics or anyone else. They are the real deal. As dangerous and worthy of applause as their 31-4 record should have already imposed on them.
This game alone should speak for that.
When the Thunder and Cavaliers meet on Wednesday, it will be the first time in NBA history a team with a 15-game winning streak (Oklahoma City) faces a team with a 10-game winning streak (Cleveland).
It will be the first interconference game in NBA In history, at this point in a season, teams with winning percentages of .850 or higher play each other, and the first time since the 1971-72 season at least two teams have won 30 of their first 35 games.
The Thunder are 11-0 against the Eastern Conference this season. The Cavs are 10-0 against the West.
The Thunder have the best defense in the game. The Cavs have the best offense.
This is a great game between great teams. two huge teams.
And yet, it seems that a doubt persists in every corner of the NBA. That’s not true for the Thunder. But it is for his opponent.
The question isn’t Cleveland’s outstanding play, per se, but rather its place as a true NBA contender, undoubted and scary.
“Cleveland?” mused one Eastern Conference general manager, when asked about the Cavs being viewed as a fierce conference foe. “Great season. Really good team. Excellent on both sides of the ball. But are they, quote, unbeatable? No.
“They weren’t the Heat when they had LeBron [James]Dwayne [Wade] and Chris Bosh,” he said. “They’re not the Kobe [Bryant] Lakers, or the Spurs, or Golden State when the Warriors got [Kevin Durant]. They are really good. But they’re not a team you look at and think, ‘I don’t see how we can beat them in a seven-game series.'”
It’s a widely shared opinion, where on the one hand those in NBA circles want to praise Cleveland, and on the other they like to say that they’re not the Celtics yet, or, for that matter, the Thunder, who, unlike Boston, They are not defending champions either.
“I don’t take the Cavs that “Seriously,” said another NBA front office source. “Not that level.”
There’s more of that out there, and the point has the same common thread: Great story. An incredible start. But none of he teams to beat. Not a David, of course, but not a Goliath either.
Maybe it’s because Cleveland hasn’t done anything without LeBron James in its history, and without him, its residual brilliance hasn’t adequately highlighted how well this team really plays. Maybe it’s because they’re not, in fact, the defending champion Boston Celtics, nor the young, interesting, deep Thunder team they’ll play on Wednesday.
The Thunder, after all, have the betting favorite for this season’s MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. They have the best defense in the league, with an array of young talent and the set of assets that general manager Sam Presti has amassed through a near-perfect rebuild since moving away from Russell Westbrook and Paul George in 2019.
It’s hard not to feel the pull of a team loaded with young talent, at the top of the Western Conference, on this tremendous streak, still capable – whenever they deem it desired or necessary – of adding even more firepower to what already is. a spaceship.
But the Cavs aren’t exactly chopped liver, devoid of star power. It’s not like they’re just coasting through another NBA regular season. They have been brilliant too.
Donovan Mitchell is, indeed, a superstar. He is averaging at least 20 points per game for the eighth consecutive season, in his entire career. The other players who did that in their first eight NBA seasons this century are a short list: LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid and Carmelo Anthony.
Evan Mobley has unleashed a career year and is one of the best defenders in the league. Kenny Atkinson, in his first year as Cavs head coach, looks like a head coach reborn after stints with Ty Lue in Los Angeles and then Steve Kerr in Golden State.
Both the Cavs and Thunder have top-10 offenses and defenses, a historic hallmark of an eventual championship team.
The Cavs may not have won last season’s title or, like the Thunder, this season’s narrative.
But a win on Wednesday and Cleveland would be on its way to a 73-win season, on track to perhaps tie the Warriors’ all-time wins mark.
That is a historic beginning. This is a historic confrontation.
And maybe, for starters, a Cavs win will finally give Cleveland the respect it’s clearly already earned.
