The 2025-26 season has been a disappointment so far for the Cleveland Cavaliers, as they are just 24-20 and hold the No. 7 seed in the Eastern Conference.
Cleveland won 64 games last season and was the No. 1 seed in the East, yet it’s already lost more games than it did in the entire 2024-25 campaign.
Cavs insider Chris Fedor recently revealed a troubling theme that he senses within the team, saying that it feels like the Cavs are becoming a team that isn’t “believing” the things that it is saying.
“I think I said it about two weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago,” Fedor began. “It started feeling like a team that wasn’t believing the things it was saying. They felt like they had to say those things because they had been saying those things over and over and over again, and they wanted a consistent message.
“But it just didn’t feel like they were believing the things that they were saying. And you get that sense just being around this team more and more and more. You get a sense of them looking around and saying, ‘Can we do this? Can we fix this? Are we going to be able to fix this?’”
The Cavs still have time to turn their season around, but with Max Strus still out of the lineup and Darius Garland and Sam Merrill hurt again, the pressure is on other players to step up.
Donovan Mitchell has played at a high level, but a lot of the other players on the Cavs have not made progress this season. That has put Cleveland in the mix for a play-in spot in the East rather than a top seed.
Cleveland is 8.5 games back of the No. 1-seeded Detroit Pistons, but it still could make a push up the standings in the 2025-26 campaign. The Cavs are just three games out of the No. 2 seed and 1.5 games back of the No. 3-seeded New York Knicks in a wide open Eastern Conference.
Unfortunately, the Cavs have not played at a high level this season, which makes them a tough team to trust in the playoffs. Cleveland has yet to make it out of the second round with this current core, and now that it’s playing worse than it did last season, changes may be needed for the team to maximize the rest of Mitchell’s prime.
If the Cavs are struggling to believe that they can turn around the season, then it is hard to see them making their best playoff run in the Mitchell era in the 2025-26 campaign.
The squad will look to gain some ground in the East on Wednesday when it takes on LaMelo Ball and the Charlotte Hornets. Cleveland is 1-1 against the Hornets this season, but it did win the last meeting between the teams back on Dec. 22.