CLEVELAND — Cleveland Cavaliers basketball is officially back, and not a moment too soon!
With the Guardians' season coming to an end recently in the ALCS and the Browns season well on its way to "forgettable" status, the Cavaliers enter into the 2024-25 season with a clean slate.
With the exception of a preseason injury to sharpshooter Max Strus, Cleveland will open Game 1 of the regular season against the Toronto Raptors with healthy superstars and a new vision under head coach Kenny Atkinson.
The Cavs will look different this year, but that difference won't show up if you look at the names on the roster. The wine and gold welcome back a mostly unchanged roster from last year's team. The contract extensions of Donovan Mitchell, Evan Mobley, and Jarrett Allen took up the majority of the headlines from this past offseason.
But with the departure of head coach J.B. Bickerstaff and hiring of Kenny Atkinson, Koby Altman made a big gamble that the addition of an offensively minded head coach will unlock the issues this young Cavalier team has had on that side of the ball since the arrival of Donovan Mitchell.
So why should you believe this year will be different? What changes can be made to put the Cavaliers in the same breath as the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics, Milwaukee Bucks, and New York Knicks?
Below are three reasons why the wine and gold CAN take that next stop into the class of the Eastern Conference in the 2024-25 season.
1. Kenny Atkinson's brand new vision
It would be completely unfair to dump all of the blame for the last few years on former head coach J.B. Bickerstaff. There were plenty of reasons the Cavs were a flawed team beyond his coaching and philosophy.
But it became evident towards the end of last season and into the playoffs that Bickerstaff did not hold the answers to unlocking the Cavs' potential on offense, and nothing could be more important than unlocking that potential should Cleveland be seen as a viable threat in the East.
In his first head coaching stint with the Brooklyn Nets from 2016 through 2020, Atkinson bore the responsibility of taking a young team with far less talent and building them into a playoff team. He accomplished that task after two sub-30 win seasons in the 2018-19 season, taking a Nets squad that was thought to be years away from contention to a playoff appearance as a 7-seed.
After leaving Brooklyn the next year, Atkinson continued his coaching career with the Clippers and most notably the Golden State Warriors for the past three seasons. As an assistant coach, he won his first NBA championship in the 2022 Finals.
Since the Cavs hired Atkinson, he's talked about picking up the pace on offense. He's talked about taking more 3-point attempts. What better place to hone in your philosophy in that style of offense than Golden State?
Many put the moniker of "the guy before the guy" on Bickerstaff. Nobody can possibly know in October of 2024 whether Atkinson will be the second guy in that phrase, or just another "guy" before the next.
But at least on paper, he seems to check all of the boxes when it comes to maximizing a roster that Koby Altman deemed talented enough to run back without any major changes in Atkinson's first year.
2. Darius Garland's bounce back year
To call Garland's 2023-24 season a nightmare might be the kindest description you can assign it.
Garland got into a scoring groove early into the December slate of regular season games, playing with the confidence that earned him an All-Star bid in 2022 before Donovan Mitchell had even arrived. Then disaster struck: A broken jaw derailed his progress, causing him to miss a month and a half of games.
Not only did Garland miss a significant portion of the season, he lost 12 pounds due to the recovery process that forced him to have his jaw wired shut and a liquid diet for much of the recovery period.
To make matters worse, the death of his grandmother during the season, along with his injury, set the point guard on an emotional and physical spiral that he never seemed to conquer before the Cavs' loss to the Celtics in the second round of the playoffs.
The reality of his 2023-24 campaign saw him take a significant step backwards in points per game, assists per game, and 3-point field goal percentage (worst since his rookie year).
The fact remains that Garland is a unique, All-Star level offensive talent. It was not long ago that Garland was mentioned in the same breath as 2023-24 MVP runner-up Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as part of the next great group of point guards to take over the NBA.
Under Bickerstaff, Garland and Mitchell never got to the point where their fit together felt seamless. That was compounded last year by a slow start and Garland's injury.
Under Atkinson, the push for more pace and 3-point attempts on offense presents Garland with a prime opportunity to show off the full gambit of his offensive arsenal.
While the NBA has slowly turned away from the "How many superstars has your team accumulated?" model of winning championships, the fact remains that championship caliber teams often have those All-Star/superstar players in ball handling and facilitating roles. Garland has already proven he can be that in this league.
Now it's all about staying healthy and getting back that confidence that made all-time talents like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry heap praise on the point guard in the past.
3. The long awaited, desperately needed Evan Mobley leap
There may be no bigger variable in the Cavaliers' championship viability than Evan Mobley's ascent into superstar status.
It felt like a prophecy when Mobley entered the league. He was called a unicorn, a no-doubter, a franchise changer. Defensively, he has lived up hype.
Should Kenny Atkinson unlock the offensive part of Mobley's game, the sky is the limit for where this team could go.
Mobley has always shown flashes of that offensive ability: quick, efficient footwork in the post — a unique agility most 7-footers can only dream of — and a sneaky ability to facilitate as a big man from the post or the wing.
Fit questions once again come into question with newly re-signed center Jarrett Allen. Looking at last year's offensive rating, the combination of Mobley and Allen on the floor together spelled doom for Cleveland's offense.
When the two shared the floor together, the team had an offensive rating of 110.2. When comparing that to the rest of the league's offensive rating in the 2023-24 season, they would rank as the fourth-worst offense in the league, hanging near the likes of the Pistons, Wizards, Spurs, and Trail Blazers.
With Mobley off the floor and Allen on? A 117.3 offensive rating that would put them near the top 10.
While offensive rating doesn't tell the entire story, it does drive home that Evan Mobley needs to take that offensive leap not only for the sake of roster fit, but to take the Cavaliers beyond the second tier of the Eastern Conference playoff picture.
He does not need to be the second coming of Kevin Garnett or Kevin Durant, but developing an outside shot and displaying confidence and decisiveness with the ball in his hands can unlock the fix to many deficiencies that held the wine and gold back against the league's best teams.