After a historic start to the 2024-25 NBA season, the Cleveland Cavaliers have suddenly hit a wall, now losers of three straight and seeing their hopes of winning 70 games this season all but end. Two of those losses occurred vs the Houston Rockets, both in heartbreaking fashion in crunch time, including Saturday evening’s brutal home defeat to Houston.
After the game on Saturday, Cavs star Donovan Mitchell got one hundred percent real on how the team is responding to the rare rough patch.
“We should have won this game. We should have won the past two,” said Mitchell, per Spencer Davies of Sports Illustrated on X. “But it happens. The sky is not falling. We’re fine. But we’ve got to just be better.”
Darius Garland shared a similar sentiment.
“We knew it was going to come,” said Garland. “Just having a great season so far, we knew we were going to hit a small little wall. Just didn’t know when it was going to come. But we have some adversity, now we’ve just got to get over the hump and try to get better, and try to just learn out of it. We’ve really got to creep out of the slump that we’re in, and I think it’s going to start on the defensive end.”
Garland missed two free throws late in the game between the Cavs and Rockets that took place earlier this week in Houston, free throws that would have won the game for Cleveland.
Now, with a loss to the Philadelphia 76ers sandwiched in between, the Cavs have seen their Eastern Conference lead over the Boston Celtics reduced to under five games for the first time in a while.
No need to panic for the Cavs
David Richard-Imagn Images
Despite the rough patch they’ve hit, it might end up being a good thing over the long haul for the team to face some adversity now. We previously saw the downsides of a team chasing historic win totals when the Golden State Warriors ran out of gas in the postseason in 2016 after winning 73 games during the regular year.
There’s also something to be said about “peaking too early,” which the Cavs themselves may have done during the 2022-23 season, which culminated in a train wreck of a playoff loss to the New York Knicks.
The Cavs will look to get back in the win column on Monday evening vs the upstart Detroit Pistons.
