Cleveland Cavaliers

Cleveland Cavaliers, American professional basketball team based in Cleveland that plays in the Eastern Conference of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and has won one NBA title (2016).

The Cavaliers began play as an NBA expansion team in 1970 under the ownership of the ambitious entrepreneur Nick Mileti, who at one time owned not only the Cavs but also baseball’s Cleveland Indians and the city’s World Hockey Association franchise (the Cavaliers have since gone through several changes of ownership). Coached by Bill Fitch and playing in the antiquated Cleveland Arena, the Cavs finished their first season with the worst record in the league, a frustrating exercise that was epitomized by John Warren unwittingly shooting at and scoring in the opponent’s basket during one game. The team’s poor season did net them the first overall selection in the 1971 NBA draft, which they used to select guard Austin Carr, the Cavaliers’ first star player.

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Cleveland slowly improved through the early ’70s, and in the 1975–76 season Fitch guided a team featuring Carr, forward Bobby (“Bingo”) Smith, and centre Nate Thurmond—a key mid-season acquisition—to a 49–33 record and the team’s first division championship. The first playoff series in team history (an Eastern Conference semifinal against the Washington Bullets) was highlighted by three last-second game-winning shots by the Cavs, and the series became known as the “Miracle of Richfield” (for the suburban location of the Coliseum, the team’s home arena from 1974 to 1994). After winning the seven-game series, the Cavaliers advanced to the Eastern Conference finals, where they lost to the Boston Celtics in six games.

Cleveland followed its “Miracle” season with two consecutive winning campaigns that each led to playoff berths, but the Cavs were eliminated in the first round both times. The team then entered into a period marked by poor front-office decisions and high head-coach turnover, and the Cavs posted losing records in each season between 1978–79 and 1986–87. In 1985, however, Wayne Embry took over as the team’s general manager and hired Lenny Wilkens as the Cavs’ head coach for the 1986–87 season.

Wilkens shaped the Cavs into a defensive-minded squad that quickly saw a good measure of success. With a roster that featured centre Brad Daugherty, guard Mark Price, and forward Larry Nance, the Cavs won 42 games in the 1987–88 season but were eliminated by Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the playoffs. The next year’s postseason series against Jordan’s Bulls, however, proved to be significantly more memorable. The Cavs finished the 1988–89 regular season with a then-franchise-best 57–25 record, which was second only to that of the Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference. Cleveland’s first-round series against the Bulls extended to a deciding fifth game, which ended when Jordan—after dramatically hanging in midair as defender Craig Ehlo passed by—made a buzzer-beating basket that became known simply as “The Shot.” The Cavaliers matched their all-time best record during the 1991–92 season, and they defeated the New Jersey Nets and the Boston Celtics in the playoffs en route to a berth in the Eastern Conference finals. There they once again faced off against the Bulls, who eliminated the Cavs in six games.

The Cavs moved to a new arena in downtown Cleveland in 1994. They advanced to the playoffs five times in the six seasons between 1992–93 and 1997–98—but advanced past the first round on just one occasion, a conference semifinal loss to the Bulls in 1993—and then posted losing records for six consecutive seasons, including a conference-worst 17–65 mark in 2002–03. That finish resulted in the Cavaliers again gaining the first selection in the NBA draft, which they used to select LeBron James, a much-touted high school star from nearby Akron. James guided the Cavaliers back to the postseason in 2005–06, and one year later the franchise made its first appearance in the NBA finals, where the young Cavs were swept by the San Antonio Spurs. In 2008–09 the Cavaliers won 66 games, posting the best record in the NBA that season. However, after easily sweeping the Detroit Pistons and the Atlanta Hawks in the first two rounds of the postseason, the Cavs were upset by the Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference finals. The Cavs again had an NBA-best record in 2009–10 but were upset in the second round of the playoffs by the Celtics. During the following off-season, James signed with the Miami Heat, and the Cavaliers returned to the lower echelons of the NBA in 2010–11.

The team’s poor play combined with outstanding luck in the NBA draft lottery to result in the Cavs’ winning the top overall draft pick in an unprecedented three out of four years between 2011 and 2014. Cleveland’s resulting young and promising core of players—headlined by All-Star point guard Kyrie Irving—proved encouraging enough to lure James back to the team when he became a free agent in July 2014. The Cavs then traded for a third perennial All-Star, power forward Kevin Love, and entered the 2014–15 season as the odds-on favourite in the Eastern Conference. Cleveland struggled early in the season before the young team came together to post the second best record in the conference. Despite the team’s loss of Love to a season-ending injury in Cleveland’s fourth playoff game and a banged-up Irving missing multiple playoff contests, James’s stellar postseason play led the franchise to its second appearance in the NBA finals. Irving suffered a broken kneecap during the first game of the finals, but James still led Cleveland to its first two finals victories before the team ultimately lost the NBA title to the Golden State Warriors in six games.

The Cavaliers again clinched the top seed in the Eastern Conference in 2015–16 and this time avoided the injury bug in the conference playoffs, where the team lost just two games en route to earning a rematch with the Warriors, who had set a league record with 73 wins during the regular season, in the NBA finals. There the Cavaliers went down three games to one before James and Irving began a stretch of outstanding play. The two led Cleveland to three straight wins while on the brink of elimination—something that had never previously been done in the NBA finals—to capture the franchise’s first NBA championship. Cleveland won 51 games the following season to qualify for the playoffs as the Eastern Conference’s second seed. The team then ran through the first three rounds of the playoffs—losing just once over the course of those series—to set up another meeting with the Warriors in the NBA finals, which was the first time in league history that two teams faced off for the championship in three consecutive seasons. The Cavs could not repeat their stunning upset of the previous season, however, and they lost to the Warriors in a five-game series.

Irving requested a trade in the following off-season, and the reconfigured Cavaliers could not properly replace his offense, struggling to the fourth best record in the Eastern Conference during the 2017–18 regular season. But James once again played magnificently in the playoffs, leading Cleveland to its fourth consecutive conference title and another finals matchup against the Warriors. However, the exhausted and less-talented Cavaliers roster put up little resistance to the Warriors, who swept Cleveland in a four-game series. James left Cleveland for the Los Angeles Lakers in free agency during the following off-season, and the Cavaliers regressed without their superstar, finishing 2018–19 with the same losing record (19–63) that the franchise had posted in the season after his previous departure.