Cavs’ talent, chemistry lead to team-best start

Cleveland, which hosts Miami today, is the only unbeaten team at home.

The Washington Post

DENVER — After the Cleveland Cavaliers claimed an impressive road win over the Denver Nuggets last week, LeBron James shot up from the seat in front of his locker stall and burst into an off-key, high-pitched tune with incoherent words that seemed to have been invented by his 18-month-old son, Bryce. Before the song could be dismissed as gibberish, guard Delonte West formed a duet with James from the other end of the locker room.

Back and forth they went, screeching contentedly, and then it all made sense: The Cavaliers just get one another.

It has happened relatively quickly. Only five of these Cavaliers were on the roster at this point last season. But with Cleveland off to the best start in franchise history at 25-4 — a 70-win pace — there is no denying that the team has clicked. As they prepare to host the Miami Heat today, the Cavaliers are the only unbeaten team at home at 15-0.

“I’ve said this many times before: Watching this team come together, watching them interact with one another, it’s some unusual stuff,” Cavaliers coach Mike Brown said. “They’ve found on their own that if they can trust one another, at the end of the day, that’s what helps build chemistry and that carries over to the floor.”

Brown talks about how players started to jell in training camp, watching “Monday Night Football” together, hanging out after practice and at games. James likes to refer to the Cavaliers as family because “no one is isolated from the other.”

That chemistry didn’t immediately translate when Cleveland started the season 1-2, with losses to Boston and New Orleans. Since then, the Cavaliers have won 24 of 26, with 18 of those wins decided by at least 10 points. They have allowed the fewest points per game at 89.2 — New Orleans is second at 91.2 — and have the lo west defensive field goal percentage (42.16).

For the first time since Brown became coach after the 2004-05 season, they have managed to blend relentless defense with efficient, high-powered offense. Cleveland is seventh in the league in scoring (102.0 points per game) and third in team shooting percentage (47.9 percent).

The defending champion Celtics are the first team in NBA history to start a season 27-2 and won a franchise-record 19 games in a row before two straight losses, but Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey said the Cavaliers have actually had the most impressive start.

“They’re rolling in every sense of the word,” said Morey, whose Rockets lost to Cleveland, 99-90. “They’ve had a tougher schedule, and they are beating opponents by a larger margin [than Boston]. This is one of the best 30-game starts in history.”

After winning the Eastern Conference in 2007, the Cavaliers struggled at the start of last season, with Anderson Varejao and Sasha Pavlovic in contract holdouts, and Larry Hughes and Damon Jones unhappy with their roles. GM Danny Ferry broke up the team with a huge midseason trade to land West, Ben Wallace and Wally Szczerbiak. Cleveland pushed the Celtics to seven games in the second round of the playoffs, but James said, “We didn’t have enough time to make what I thought we could become.”

Cleveland acquired point guard Mo Williams from the Milwaukee Bucks in a three-team trade this past summer, and all of a sudden the pieces started to fit. Center Zydrunas Ilgauskas is producing like he did during his two all-star seasons. Wallace, a former all-star center and the highest-paid player on the team, has accepted the responsibility to defend and rebound at power forward. And West, Williams, Szczerbiak and Daniel Gibson give the team a stable of shooters to surround James, who is a front-runner for the league’s most valuable player award by making the spectacular look routine.

The early success prompted James to make the somewhat surprising declaration that he would consider signing a contract extension in the summer and avoid becoming a free agent in 2010.

“His leadership is really off the charts,” Brown said of James. “He picked up a lot of things playing with the gold medal team [at the Beijing Olympics] and being around those types of players, being with Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] and the other guys on that staff. But he still hasn’t reached his ceiling. There is plenty of potential still with LeBron James.”

The Cavaliers are looking to defy conventional wisdom in the post-Magic Johnson-Larry Bird era that teams need at least two stars to win a championship.