By Jared Weiss, Jay King, Sam Amick and Mike Prada
The Cleveland Cavaliers’ perfect start to the 2024-25 NBA season is over thanks to a barrage of 3s from the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics.
Jayson Tatum scored 33 points and the Celtics hit 22 3-pointers on 41 attempts to earn a 120-117 home victory over the Cavaliers in a game billed as an early preview of a potential Eastern Conference finals.
Cleveland’s 15-0 start will remain tied with the 1993-94 Houston Rockets and the 1948-49 Washington Capitols for the second-best start to a season, behind the 24-0 mark the Golden State Warriors achieved in its eventual 73-win season in 2015-16. All three teams reached that season’s NBA Finals, though only the Rockets won a championship.
Boston moves to 12-3 this season and pulls within two and a half games of Cleveland for the top spot in the Eastern Conference. Both teams are 1-1 in NBA Cup play.
The Celtics led by as many as 21 points early in the third quarter, making 18 3s in the first 28 minutes of the game. Cleveland then stormed back with a 22-5 run led by Evan Mobley, who scored 14 points in the quarter, including a put-back dunk off his own miss. Cleveland cut the deficit to two points on multiple occasions, but Tatum nailed a stepback 3 over Cavaliers forward Georges Niang at the third-quarter buzzer to give Boston a 93-88 advantage entering the final quarter.
JT, THAT’S TOUGH 😮💨
The step-back triple gives the Celtics a 5-point lead heading into the 4th!
🏆 East Group C action
🏀 CLE-BOS on TNT pic.twitter.com/S56OofnmnT— NBA (@NBA) November 20, 2024
The Cavaliers kept threatening early in the fourth quarter, but Boston always seemed to have an answer. A Payton Pritchard 3 off a kickout pass from Tatum gave Boston a seven-point lead with 5:29 remaining and ignited the TD Garden crowd. A 3-pointer by Derrick White and two blocks from Al Horford provided Boston some separation, and Cleveland failed cut Boston’s lead to less than three points afterward.
Mobley finished with 22 points and 11 assists while Donovan Mitchell shook off a slow start to finish with 35 points.
Celtics-Cavs is best matchup so far this season
If this is all there is among the Eastern Conference elite, with the Celtics and Cavs looking like world-beaters and every other squad … not, then let’s take the glass-is-half-full approach and appreciate what we have rather than what we don’t. In that regard, it was fitting that this beautiful basketball game took place on the same day as the Philadelphia 76ers’ implosion continuing with news of their star players calling each other out in team meetings to discuss their demise.
The Sixers, much like the Milwaukee Bucks, were widely expected to be part of a loaded East where it would take months to truly decipher which team the Celtics should be most concerned about. Instead, with Cleveland’s 15-0 start putting the Cavs in rarified historic air that typically leads to a finals appearance, Boston saw its lone true threat coming and wasted no time sending an impressive early message about their plans to continue inhabiting the NBA’s throne.
Yet while the ending of this Cavs streak keeps them from chasing the league record, it changes nothing about the clear legitimacy of this matchup. The Cavs, who fell to the Celtics without Mitchell, Jarrett Allen and Caris LeVert in their second-round series last postseason, nearly pulled off the comeback despite not having four of their top 11 rotation players (Dean Wade, Max Strus, LeVert and Isaac Okoro) on Tuesday. What’s more, they lost by three in a game where Darius Garland had one of the worst shooting nights of his life (3-for-21 overall; 0-for-6 on 3s).
So yes, in other words, it’s quite clear that Celtics-Cavs is the best thing going so far in this early NBA season. — Sam Amick, senior NBA writer
Celtics’ defense improving
After giving up a load of points in the paint to the Atlanta Hawks and the Toronto Raptors, coach Joe Mazzulla hammered home the same points of emphasis over recent days: individual defense and rebounding. He believed the Celtics’ point-of-attack defenders needed to handle their assignments better, while the defenders needed to improve their positioning. And Mazzulla wanted the defensive rebounding, which had slipped to 20th over the past five games, to, ahem, rebound.
Though the Celtics gave up 22 points in the paint during an ugly third quarter, which let Cleveland back into the game, they also showed their defense can still punch much more like Mike Tyson in his prime than the 58-year-old version. Mitchell scored 35 points but needed 29 field goal attempts and six free throw attempts to accomplish it. Garland, having a big season, scored just eight points.
The Cavaliers, who entered the game shooting 41.9 percent from behind the arc, tied a season-low with 10 3-pointers. They only created 29 3-point attempts, just one more than their season low.
The Celtics still showed their vulnerabilities on defense, especially during the destructive third quarter. But they brought a different type of edge for the big game. Now they need to do it more consistently in less exciting matchups. — Jay King, Celtics beat writer
Cavs show potential to take down the defending champs
Cleveland’s offense has been tearing through the league, but it finally ran into a brick wall in Boston. The winning streak is over, as Cleveland finally had a poor shooting night from deep and couldn’t keep up with Boston’s 3-point barrage.
The Cavs made some effective halftime adjustments to get Mobley post-ups against Boston’s smalls to spark a third-quarter run, while Mitchell had success mismatch hunting. Mitchell showed who the top dog in Cleveland is with some crunch-time magic, but Cleveland never quite found the offensive flow it’s had all season.
The Cavaliers were never going to finish the season 82-0. Mitchell said before the game that Cleveland wants to learn some lessons from this game, win or lose. The Cavs have to figure out their math problem against the Celtics. Dominating the paint won’t be enough against Boston most nights.
The Cavaliers know they have a lot to work on to take down the defending champs, but the second half of this game showed they have the potential to do it. — Jared Weiss, Celtics beat writer
Required reading
(Photo: Bob DeChiara / Imagn Images)
