CLEVELAND — It is rare to be able to make such a definitive statement based on the outcome of one regular-season game in the NBA, but then again, what is happening with the two teams who met in Cleveland on Wednesday night is not normal.
Right now, the Cleveland Cavaliers are the league’s best team. Hands down. They’ve passed all the tests, knocking off the league’s hottest team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, 129-122, in what easily lived up to the hype as the league’s biggest game of the season to date.
“I don’t know where to rank them, but they have definitely earned their record,” Thunder guard Jalen Williams said. “You don’t get to 32-4 by accident.”
Jarrett Allen shined perhaps the brightest among numerous outstanding individual performances on both sides with 25 points, 12 rebounds, six assists and three steals for Cleveland. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a leading MVP candidate, led both teams with 31 points on 27 shots but missed much of the third quarter due to foul trouble.
There were 30 lead changes and eight ties in this nip-and-tuck affair that featured a frenetic pace and physical play at both ends of the floor.
Cleveland has not only won 11 straight for its second winning streak this season of at least that many but is now an NBA-best 32-4; the Cavs are the seventh team in league history to win at least 32 of their first 36.
11 STRAIGHT ✅
32-4 RECORD ✅
A SPECIAL start to the season for the @cavs! pic.twitter.com/0qv6Gag37c
— NBA (@NBA) January 9, 2025
What makes it easy to say Cleveland is inarguably the best in the sport right now, based on what happened on the court Wednesday evening, is the Thunder (30-6) entered on a franchise-best 15-game winning streak and on pace to win 70 games as the top team in the West.
“I think it’s a huge feedback game,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said before the matchup, calling it a “big test” that his team went on to pass.
And when it was all over, when the uninterrupted hum of 20,000 fans screaming, whooping and gasping with every impressive play — and there were too many to count — Atkinson added: “Was that a great basketball game? Forget who won or who lost. How do you describe that game? It was a beautiful game.”
The game may have turned for good when Donovan Mitchell, the Cavs’ biggest star who was struggling through an uncharacteristically tough night, was called for a foul on Luguentz Dort with 1:19 left and the Cavs ahead by 3. Cleveland challenged the call and had it overturned, retaining possession of the ball.
Evan Mobley, Allen’s frontcourt mate who was nearly as good with 21 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists, drained a 10-footer with 1:07 left after the foul on Mitchell was overturned. Gilgeous-Alexander missed a contested layup on the ensuing possession and Darius Garland, who had 18 points, iced the game with a layup with 27 seconds left.
“It was fun,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “We just came up on the short end of the stick. … We weren’t going to win every game.”
DARIUS GARLAND CLUTCH 😤 pic.twitter.com/VE2Z3GovcC
— ESPN (@espn) January 9, 2025
Williams contributed 25 points and nine assists, and Isaiah Hartenstein had 18 points, 11 boards and eight assists.
Mitchell — Cleveland’s leading scorer for the season and the only player out of the Cavs’ four stars who is currently on pace to be an All-Star (voted in as a starter) — was scoreless until there was 1:53 left in the second quarter and finished with 11 points on 3-of-16 shooting. Cleveland received two huge performances off the bench from Max Strus (17 points and five assists) and Ty Jerome (15 points, 6-of-7 shooting) who spearheaded a 43-26 advantage the Cavs enjoyed in bench scoring.
The Cavs also made 15 3s and, as the league’s top 3-point shooting team, connected on nearly 42 percent of their shots from deep. Strus led the way with five 3s.
“I told everybody after the game, as a unit we don’t win this game last year,” Mitchell said. “Everybody that came in did something positive to affect the game. … That’s a team win. That’s what it’s going to take to be the team we want to be.”
The Thunder came in not only as the league’s best defensive team but also on a historic winning streak that included wins over the defending-champion Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, Memphis Grizzlies and Minnesota Timberwolves.
Hartenstein and Dort are considered among the most physical defenders in the NBA, and in fact, Hartenstein was a member of the New York team two years ago that so thoroughly whipped the Cavs in a playoff series that Cleveland is still trying to shake off unflattering labels from it.
“Soft,” you may say? Not anymore. Not Allen nor Mobley. With the attention OKC paid to disrupting Mitchell, Allen and Mobley attacked and went 17-of-24 combined with 17 free throws between them.
“They’re a little tougher for sure,” Hartenstein said. “Mobley got a little stronger, bigger, but (what the Cavs’ bigs did to the Thunder) is all stuff I can control.”
The Thunder are missing their top post player, Chet Holmgren, who is still recovering from a broken pelvis, and wing defender Alex Caruso.
According to data distributed by the NBA, this was just the second time in history that two teams had won at least 30 of their first 35 games, and the Cavs-Thunder matchup was the first game between a team from the East and the West with winning percentages of .850 or better. This was also the first time a team riding a 10-game winning streak had ever met an opponent with a 15-game winning streak on the line.
Perhaps the best news for the casual NBA fan (and the league office) is these two teams meet again on Jan. 16 in Oklahoma City, set for broadcast nationally on TNT. (Wednesday’s meeting was also a national game broadcast on ESPN.)
The Thunder play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Friday. Cleveland hasn’t lost to the West (11-0) this season; Oklahoma City’s only loss to an Eastern team happened Wednesday in Cleveland.
Oklahoma City’s last loss in a game that counted was on Dec. 1 against Houston. The Thunder also lost the NBA Cup championship to Milwaukee — in the only game played during the regular season that does not count against a team’s win-loss record.
“This isn’t to diminish any other game, but these elevated games are great. They’re great in terms of learning our own team — what carries over against certain opponents, what doesn’t, what we need to improve on,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “And the extra noise, I said this during the (NBA) Cup stuff, you know, like that stuff is stuff you have to cut through if you want to be a really good team. And so we have to cut through it and get present in the competition.”
(Photo: David Liam Kyle / NBAE via Getty Images)
