The North Star that will motivate the Cleveland Cavaliers to enjoy a successful 2025-26 season is the pursuit of the team’s second championship in franchise history. On paper, the Cavaliers appear to have as good a chance as any team in the East to be the last team standing in the 2026 NBA Playoffs, and results from an NBA.com survey involving general managers around the league seem to reflect that.
While the Oklahoma City Thunder — the defending champions — were by far the most common answer to the question of who will win the title this season, the Cavaliers finished tied with the Denver Nuggets for second place. Cleveland earned seven percent of the vote in total. The Houston Rockets and New York Knicks also received votes.
For a while, the tea leaves hinted that 2025 would be the year that Cleveland would finally shake its playoff demons with its “core four” and get over the championship hump. The Cavaliers won 64 games in the 2024-25 regular season, the second-most victories in a campaign in team history, and they even enjoyed a franchise-best winning streak of 16 games at one point.
But any hopes that Cleveland turned a new leaf came crashing down in the 2025 NBA Playoffs. The squad gave fans flashbacks of its underwhelming playoff stints in recent years with a letdown showing against the Indiana Pacers in the second round. The Cavaliers beat the Pacers just once before bowing out in five games, and they also failed to win a home game during the series.
The squad’s odyssey toward another championship will officially kick off when the team faces the Knicks on Oct. 22 at Madison Square Garden. New York could very well prove to be Cleveland’s biggest competition in the East this season, so a road win would be a great way to usher in a new 82-game slate.
A title for the Cavaliers in 2026 would be their first in a decade. Cleveland reached the top of the basketball world for the first time back in 2016, and it pulled off a dramatic 3-1 comeback in that year’s championship series to win in seven games.