The Cleveland Cavaliers are cruising along at a rapid clip with a 12-game winning streak, so their next game might not even look like a speed bump.
The Cavaliers have a road assignment against the Charlotte Hornets on Friday night.
The goal for Cleveland, which became the first team in the NBA to clinch a playoff berth Wednesday night, will be to maintain its crisp level of play.
“It seems like everything has gone our way this year,” Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said. “Is there some luck? Sure there is because it’s so hard to win in the NBA. … We have had some fortune.”
The Cavaliers are looking at the big picture, so there’s more work ahead.
“It’s an honor. It’s a sign of our hard work as a group,” guard Donovan Mitchell said of the earliest the franchise has qualified for the postseason. “… It’s just another step on our journey, but we’ve got a lot more to accomplish.”
The Cavaliers and Hornets, who are mired in an eight-game losing streak, sure have different outlooks at this time of the season.
“This is really special, a season like this,” Atkinson said. “We got great talent, great continuity and great togetherness.”
It’s not nearly as rosy for the Hornets.
“We just got to continue to stick with it,” Charlotte coach Charles Lee said. “The team continues to fight, but on every possession, we have to continue to fight and not have these long lulls during the game.”
Charlotte’s changing roster with various players unavailable because of injuries at different times throughout the season has a troubling cumulative impact on the Hornets, Lee said. The coach said there’s not a lot of experience among several player combinations.
“When you’re indecisive, it holds you back,” Lee said.
Many of the breakdowns in communication appear to be happening on defense. Those are particularly evident early in games as opponents tend to rack up sizable leads.
But the shortcomings exist on the other end of the court as well. They might even begin with offensive flaws.
“I do think it’s our lack of conversion on offense sometimes,” Lee said. “Especially for young players and this team in general, we get focused a bit too much on the offensive side of the ball. We let a missed layup or a transition turnover affect us too much, and then it hurts our defensive side of the ball.”
The defensive glitches have come in various forms. That’s the frustrating part to Lee.
“Good defensive process on the other end, and then you give up an offensive rebound,” he said. “Some of those plays can hurt your spirit at times.”
Mitchell has been the top Cleveland scorer in nine of the last 13 games. But he hasn’t topped the team’s scoring list season vs. the Hornets.
The Cavaliers have won all three previous meetings with Charlotte. The closest margin in those games was the most-recent matchup — 115-105 on Jan. 5 in Cleveland. Evan Mobley had a career-high 41 points in a 116-102 victory on Dec. 7 at Charlotte.
LaMelo Ball was Charlotte’s leading scorer in two games against Cleveland this season. In the other game, Brandon Miller topped the team’s scoring list, but he’s out with a season-ending wrist injury.
Ball, who averages a team-high 26.2 points per game, and Miles Bridges combined for 51 of the Hornets’ points in their 125-110 loss to visiting Minnesota on Wednesday.
–Field Level Media
