Here’s what you need to know ahead of Thursday’s highly anticipated rematch
Last week, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Oklahoma City Thunder played one of the most exciting regular-season games in recent NBA history. The two teams entered the game with a combined record of 61-9. Oklahoma City had won 15 consecutive regular-season games before tipoff. Cleveland had won “only” 10 straight… but each of those victories came by at least 10 points. This game was a possible Finals preview, yes, but it was more than that. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single regular-season game between two teams playing at that level that late into the season at any point in NBA history.
The game itself didn’t disappoint. Cleveland won, 129-122, and neither team ever led by double digits. It took a titanic offensive rebound by Donovan Mitchell and some clutch end-of-game shotmaking from the whole Cavaliers team to put the game away for good. Afterward, it was hailed as an example of everything going right for the NBA in the middle of a season that has been so defined by what is going wrong. It could be years before we see another January NBA game quite like that one.
Or, it could happen again tonight.
That’s right folks, the Cavaliers and Thunder are running it back a mere eight days after last week’s clash of the titans. This time, the Thunder are hosting, and it will be the final matchup between the two teams unless they wind up meeting again in June. The stakes aren’t quite as historic this time. Neither is riding a significant winning streak, and with Isaiah Hartenstein injured, the Thunder are more or less out of big men. But these are the NBA’s two best teams, and they’re giving us an encore only one week after playing the Game of the Year. So let’s preview Thursday’s rematch. Here are the three biggest questions entering Thunder vs. Cavaliers Round Two.
Can Donovan Mitchell escape the Dorture Chamber?
Donovan Mitchell can score on just about anyone. He had a 50-point playoff game against Jalen Suggs a year ago. He hasn’t scored less than 29 in seven games against the Celtics since they acquired Jrue Holiday and paired him with Derrick White to create the NBA’s best defensive backcourt. He’s as close to defense-proof as star guards get. But nobody is perfect, at least not when they’re defended by Lu Dort.
Mitchell spent 35 hellish minutes in the Dorture Chamber last week. He came out of it with just 11 points on 3-of-16 shooting. This isn’t exactly new for him either. In nine head-to-head bouts, Dort has held Mitchell to 38.2% shooting from the floor and 24% on 3-pointers. Mitchell can score on anyone else, but Dort has been his kryptonite for years.
Sure, there’s some bad shooting luck factored in there, but Dort also has stylistic advantages against Mitchell, specifically. One of Mitchell’s biggest edges as a scorer is his strength. He can finish through contact and create space in tight quarters by getting low playing bully ball. This works wonders in a world that has prioritized length above most other traits defensively. Mitchell can overwhelm lanky wings, but Dort is a human cinderblock. He can’t be moved. He denies screens better than any other defender in the NBA. Beating him has less to do with craft than, well, simple shotmaking. Mitchell didn’t make his shots last week.
That doesn’t mean they were universally bad ones, though. Mitchell took five shots in the restricted area against the Thunder. His season average is 3.5. He just missed four of those shots. He took four 3-pointers that NBA.com tracking data deems either “open” or “wide-open” and only made one of them. The volume here is lower than usual, but some of that is due to scheme. Oklahoma City allows a certain type of 3 (we’ll get to that shortly) that Mitchell rarely takes. They’re on top of the above-the-break looks he favors. If he gets four clean looks from that range, he’ll usually make more than one of them.
This isn’t going to be a matchup Mitchell ever dominates. Dort takes away too much of what he does well by virtue of his strength. But there’s a difference between, say, 3-of-16 and 7-of-16. One is a normal off-night. The other is a disaster. The former is more in line with Mitchell’s standard against Dort, and it’s probably what we should expect in the rematch.
Will Oklahoma City keep conceding the corners?
The Thunder are the NBA’s best turnover-generating defense by a comfortable margin. They allow the fifth-fewest restricted area shots per game and the ninth-fewest above-the-break 3s. Those are Oklahoma City’s priorities. They want to keep the ball out of the middle of the court, away from the basket, and ultimately take it away from you. That approach has given them the NBA’s best defense. It also has one glaring weakness: no team allows more corner 3s than the Thunder.
That’s what got them knocked out of the playoffs last season. Their “trap Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving at all costs” game plan led to a barrage of corner triples from P.J. Washington and Derrick Jones Jr. The Thunder would argue that they gave up the right shots, but the Mavericks made them at a higher clip than expected. That can happen in small samples like a playoff series. A single game is an even smaller sample. And sure enough, Cleveland got 14 corner 3s against Oklahoma City last week and made eight of them.
The Thunder never relented against the Mavericks last postseason, but to be fair, the math told them not to. The Mavericks were the fourth-worst corner 3-point shooting team in the NBA a year ago. Washington and Jones combined to make less than 31% of their corner 3s for the Mavericks in the regular season, but made over 40% of them against the Thunder.
The Cavaliers are a different matter entirely. Cleveland takes the fourth-most corner 3s in the NBA (10.9 per game) and makes the fourth-best percentage of them (42.4%) in the league. Those numbers aren’t driven by a small group of players, either. The Cavaliers have 10 players that have taken at least 10 corner 3s this season. Eight of them have hit at least 40%. The two who haven’t are Sam Merrill, arguably the best shooter on the team who is simply mired in a season-long slump, and Dean Wade, who hits over 35% and topped 40% a year ago. There is no Cavalier you can leave alone in the corner. Everybody can shoot.
If this were a playoff series, we might see significant adjustments out of the Thunder. But it isn’t a playoff series. It’s a single game in the middle of January, and aside from limitations that imposes from a game-planning and practice perspective, it’s also a good reason not to show cards that you might save for the Finals. That probably means that the Thunder are sticking with their base defense in this one. I say “probably” because there’s another big factor we have to cover, both literally and figuratively.
Can a team with no bigs contain one of NBA’s best front courts?
The Thunder still haven’t had both Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren on the court in the same game yet this season, but they haven’t needed the pair of them together yet. They’ve been more than enough rim-protection individually. Lineups featuring Holmgren rank in the 99th percentile in terms of defensive efficiency this season, according to Cleaning the Glass. Lineups featuring Hartenstein rank in the 98th. They are 30-3 this season in games in which one of them remained healthy throughout.
But that means they are just 3-2 in their five other games. A tiny, mostly meaningless sample, but the defensive numbers aren’t quite as sterling. Lineups featuring neither rank in the 88th percentile defensively. Still great, but suddenly mortal. Jalen Williams is the de-facto No. 3 center on the team, and while lineups with him at the 5 are stellar offensively, they rank in just the 69th percentile defensively. Williams is a terrific overall defender and holds up remarkably well at center in a pinch, but he’s a forward, and over a longer sample, bigger teams are going to be able to exploit that.
There aren’t many bigger teams than Cleveland. The Cavaliers won the first game largely because of what happened in the paint in the final few minutes. They got every offensive rebound they needed. They spammed the same play almost every time down the floor down the stretch: a high pick-and-roll for Darius Garland meant to drag Hartenstein out of the paint and set either Evan Mobley or Jarrett Allen up inside against a smaller defender. Those two combined for 46 points and 21 rebounds last time, and that was with Hartenstein available.
Cleveland is probably going to own the paint against those Williams-at-center lineups. Of course, the flip side is that having Williams at center supercharges Oklahoma City’s offense. Good luck stopping Shai Gilgeous-Alexander when he’s surrounded by four shooters. Mobley is more than capable of defending wings, so he’ll likely take the Williams assignment, and Allen will nominally guard whoever the worst shooter on the floor is while still serving mostly as a rim-protector. That’s going to put a lot of pressure on Oklahoma City’s worst shooters, specifically Alex Caruso, to deliver on the open looks they’re going to get.
This is going to be a different sort of game than the last one these teams played. Hartenstein’s absence changes the matchups and strategy entirely. Cleveland should have the advantage purely because of the team’s optionality. The Cavs can go small if they need to. The Thunder don’t have the players to go big. But the Thunder have been winning shorthanded all year, and they’re 17-2 at home overall. This game is going to be a war no matter who winds up playing in it, and Hartenstein’s absence gives the sequel an interesting strategic wrinkle to monitor.
