The Cleveland Cavaliers came into the 2024-25 season with plenty of pressure, as this felt like a make-it-or-break-it season for their Core Four. They re-signed Donovan Mitchell and gave contract extensions to Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, while Darius Garland is entering the second year of his own 5-year deal. A ton of money has been committed to this group, with the expectation that they would take another step forward as a real threat in the Eastern Conference under new head coach Kenny Atkinson.
While they can’t fully answer whether they’ve done that until May and June, the Cavs have made an emphatic statement to open the season, as they are the NBA’s last remaining unbeaten at 11-0. That hot start is the byproduct of confidence and trust in their group, something they’ve built over the years but had to fortify by figuring out how everyone can play to their strengths. One of the difficult tasks of building confidence as a unit is that each player has to first have that confidence in themselves. The story of the young season for Cleveland has been strides in that area by the two youngest members of their core, as Garland and Mobley are playing some of the best basketball of their careers.
For Garland, he’s bounced back after a difficult 2023-24 campaign that saw him suffer a broken jaw early in the year and never get fully back to his peak level. As he explained to DIME over the weekend, after missing a third of the season, he wasn’t too interested in vacations this summer, instead opting to get in the gym and build back the strength, confidence, and wiggle that had been missing at the end of last season.
“It’s a total difference. It’s a big difference,” Garland said of how he feels starting this season compared to the second half of last year. “I’m in a good head space right now. I’m fully healthy — some little nicks, but nothing too major right now. And yeah, just came in with a lot of confidence over the summer, put in a lot of work. Especially after last year, I didn’t play a lot of games, so wasn’t a lot of vacations for me this summer, or a lot of hangout time. It was really just strictly in the gym trying to get better, trying to put some more weight and some more muscle on that I lost from last year, from having to jaw surgery. And yeah, trying to get my confidence back, trying to get my wiggle back, and my ball handling and just trying to stay consistent with it.”
Garland’s summer in the gym helped him remember how much he loves the game. One of the lasting images from the end of last season for Garland and the Cavs was Donovan Mitchell on the bench putting his arm around Garland and saying “I believe in you,” as Garland was mired in the midst of a shooting slump. It was a touching moment between teammates, but also telling of how difficult things were for Garland, who had lost his perpetual smile and was finding it difficult to have that same sense of belief.
This season, his confidence is back, as is his infectious smile, and Garland is looking to spread that positivity beyond the court as well. For Veteran’s Day weekend, that means welcoming a pair of Gold Star families from the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) to the Cavs’ games against the Nets and Bulls, as Garland is helping honor a pair of families of fallen veterans from his hometown of Gary, IN.
“It’s super cool just to have some veteran families around me,” Garland said. “My grandfathers were veterans, so just trying to show some love and support for some of the families, and show that they’re loved and that they mean a lot to us, and we know how it is battling some things that they’ve gone through and that they’ve been through. So yeah, just to have their backs and just show that they’re loved and that we really appreciate it.”
Both families have ties to Garland, as his mother went to high school with both of the fallen service members. He wants to take the opportunity his platform provides to show them love and do his favorite thing: put a smile on someone’s face.
“I try to do it a little bit more often now, especially to kids and those with special needs,” Garland said. “I was one of the kids growing up looking up to Kobe, LeBron, Dame Lillard, Steph, so when I was growing up and they were giving back to younger kids and other people, I just always wanted to do the same. I know that it’ll just make their whole day and change the way that they look at things. So, trying to do it often and just try to put a smile on somebody’s face. That always means a lot to me, because I always wear a smile on my face.”
The way the Cavs have played so far this season has put an awful lot of smiles on faces in Cleveland, and Garland credits their hot start to the connectivity of the group and the confidence that’s instilled up and down the roster. This is the third year together for the Core Four, and many of their reserves have also been part of the team for at least a year or two. That familiarity has created a culture of accountability, with Garland noting that from players to coaches to the training staff, there’s a camaraderie that allows for honest conversations that make everyone better.
The newest face in the room is head coach Kenny Atkinson, as he took over for JB Bickerstaff (now in Detroit) with aspirations of taking this group to the next level. Garland, like everyone else in Cleveland, has been impressed with how Atkinson hit the ground running with the Cavs, and highlighted the way he instills confidence in everyone as the biggest thing he’s brought to the team.
“He was a player, so he knows what it’s like playing a lot of games, and just having that confidence out on the floor — I mean, when you have that confidence, I think you just get boosted a little bit more,” Garland said. “You think that you can do anything and make any kind of shot, and that’s what our team has right now. We’re shooting the ball with confidence, making plays with confidence, and we’re doing it on both ends of the floor, and I think that’s where he’s just instilling us. Even at film, when we don’t shoot a shot we’re wide open, he’s going to get on us about shooting the ball, because that might be the only good shot that we have in that possession. So he wants us to shoot every ball with confidence, shoot every open one and just keep continuing to play hard and trust each other.”
Garland has always been a good shooter, but last season, that confidence in his shot waned a bit, particularly in the postseason. That gave Garland plenty of motivation this summer, where he stripped his game back down to the basics and built it back up with a focus on the little details that go a long way in the games.
“Just trying to pay attention to details,” Garland said. “Just try to do all the little things to make me a better scorer, make me a better shooter. Literally the smallest things, like getting my feet ready, staying down low before I even get the ball. I mean, just literally everything, all the little things. I really went back from square one, from when I started basketball and just worked my way up until I could really start moving and going full speed for the entire summer. So I really went back to the basics this summer, and just tried to clean everything up and just try to polish everything, and getting some of the results back right now.”
The results are the best shooting percentages of his career from every level, with splits of 53.8/47.5/95.0 through the first 11 games. He’s finishing better than he ever has at the rim, a byproduct of the strength he added over the summer, and he’s shooting threes at a higher rate and making more of them than he ever has as a pro. That’s a lethal combination, and he certainly seems to have found that wiggle off the bounce once again, helped by his decisiveness and confidence with the ball as both a shooter and driving to attack the defense.
Garland is far from alone in having a strong start, as the Cavs are finding a way to feed off each other and recognizing how each of them can make the others better. Along with Garland’s return to All-Star form, Mobley has become a bigger part of the offense and is a big beneficiary of that boost of confidence Atkinson has provided. Mobley playing with more force and freedom on both ends of the floor raises their ceiling, and Garland is quick to note how his play opens up so much of the floor for everyone else, calling him “our catalyst.”
“He gets us going on both ends of the floor, and he can do so many things, especially on offensive side of the ball,” Garland said. “We can set a 1-5 pick and roll with him, and I go set a pick-and-roll, or Don go set a pick-and-roll for him, and let him just work off that screen. And when he gets downhill he’s a great decision maker, so he’s going to make the right read. We really have a lot of trust in him. We just want him to continue to be confident in his game, want him to shoot some more threes, which is getting better over the years. And yeah, just to be the leader on both ends of the floor, especially defensively. Hopefully he’s All-NBA or Defensive Player of the Year this year, which he’s super capable of, and especially him and JA back there, it’s really tough to get anything at the rim.”
The grind of the NBA regular season is impossible to avoid, but the Cavs have found an early comfort in leaning on their depth. At the top, they can play to the hot hand among their stars, but they’re finding an ability to be more adaptable as a roster to change their approach and lineups as needed based on matchups and game flow. With Mobley and Allen, they’ve always been able to go big, but against Brooklyn on Saturday, they closed with a four-guard lineup and showed how they can succeed going small, with Caris LeVert and Ty Jerome stepping in and playing well to close out their 11th win to start the season.
As Garland explains, their experiences together, the highs and the lows, have taught them a lot about how they need to play, particularly in late game situations where slowing down and getting stagnant to let one player operate can be tempting, but ultimately plays into the hands of the defense.
“We have so much talent on this team and a lot of depth, so we just have a lot of confidence in everybody, and we’ve been in these situations before. Like I said, we’ve been around each other for a couple years now, so we know what to do. We’ve seen all different scenarios, from being in regular season or the playoffs, so when it’s late game situations, I think that we’re starting to get pretty good at it. And even with our depth last night, Ty Jerome and Caris, they ended the game with us. And, I mean, they made a difference when we went four guards and Evan at the five. It’s just so many different things that we can do because of because of our depth. And we got so much talent. I mean, you really have to just pick and poison, either you’re gonna give up a wide open three or a layup or a floater or something.”
Garland and the Cavs know there are no banners to be hung for a fast start to the season, but for a team that just never seemed to hit their stride a year ago, this stretch is a reminder to both themselves and the rest of the league that they do have the kind of ceiling where they can beat anyone. There are still 71 games left in the season, but building the confidence and trust internally early on figures to pay dividends down the road.
For now, the Cavs will look to prolong their winning streak as long as they can, but as Garland notes, they have “bigger plans in May and June” and hope to keep putting smiles on faces in Cleveland deep into the spring.
