The Cleveland Cavaliers rolled the Heat in the first round of the 2025 playoffs, outscoring them by 122 over the four-game sweep. It’s like Cleveland did five games’ worth of scoring in four games.
That, and winning 64 of 82 regular season games, earned the Cavs a second-round date against the team with the worst record of the four East teams remaining: the Indiana Pacers.
The Cavaliers lost Game 1 to the Pacers at home in a fluke. Not even Michael Jordan’s Bulls won every game. Indiana isn’t the best shooting team in the world, but that night they made a stupid 19 of 36 3-pointers (typical for them: 13 of 36) while the Cavaliers finished 9 of 38. If you played the game again, and the 3s simply fell normally for each team, the final score would have swung 30-plus points in Cleveland’s favor.
Sure, the Cavaliers had key injuries. But there was a good argument they could, and would, handle Pacers. Game 2 was their chance to show it. At one point the Cavaliers led 81-61. Donovan Mitchell was one of the shortest players on the court, but gargantuan in spirit. At times he attacked the paint with such mad ferocity that TV commentator Spero Dedes cried: Look at Mitchell, just playing on a different plane!
The national broadcasts have the contractual right to drag coaches onto television, staunchly against their will, between quarters. The Cavaliers were leading by so much that, going into the fourth, the interviewer pointed out there was a lot of time left seemingly in an effort to gin up excitement. Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson credited his team’s big lead to “our collective spirit; we’re playing with great force, great energy.”
Then Atkinson added: “You know Donovan. He knows the moment, he feels the moment. He knew he had to step up tonight.” Atkinson paused, then added: “Now he’s got to finish the deal.”
Mitchell rested the next two-and-a-half minutes. Then he re-entered the game and missed four of six shots, fouled twice, and turned it over three times. At no point did he look physically in command. Never did he out beast anyone to anything. But he’s a spectacular star, so he did what he could for his team, and made it to the line 11 times, making eight free throws.
But, watching back on video, mostly his movements carry something like a poker player’s tell. He pretended otherwise, but he simply didn’t have it. A dozen key plays came down to some Pacer being more explosive than Mitchell. Pascal Siakam raced the floor, found Mitchell the only Cav back, and instantly and easily scored right in his grill. So many missed shots fell near Mitchell, but someone else grabbed all except for one. Later Siakam missed a free throw, only to have his teammate Aaron Nesmith ditch Mitchell to slice viciously through the paint, grab the rebound, and dunk ferociously as Mitchell tried lamely to keep up.
That’s how the Pacers came back–not just by exploiting Mitchell, but by having way more in the tank across the board.
The highlight of Game 2 that led SportsCenter was Tyrese Haliburton. He missed a free throw with 12.4 seconds left and the Pacers down 119-117. The Cavs had Jarrett Allen and Donovan Mitchell attempting to keep Myles Turner from the rebound. But Mitchell had minimal fight; Turner tipped the ball, Haliburton ripped it out of a scrum with swinging elbows. Arguably the three players fighting hardest for that ball were all Pacers.
Haliburton scooted out of the paint and dribbled off most of the rest of the time on the clock, then drained a 3 over Ty Jerome (followed by a memorable “big balls” celebration that got Haliburton fined).
But here’s the thing: the game wasn’t over. The clock read 1.1 seconds. It was a one-point game. Teams practice this; there are famous plays for this situation that have won games. (I’ll go to the grave insisting it’s malpractice for any team not to have a timeout for that moment, but that’s another point.)
Whatever was supposed to happen … didn’t. The Cavs inbounded to Sam Merrill who flung a hoper from halfcourt that left his fingertips well after the final buzzer sounded.
The most interesting part of the whole story, though, came in Mitchell’s post-game press conference. He credited the Pacers’ speed. “It’s definitely tough to continue to play at that pace,” Mitchell said from behind sunglasses. And as for the final play, Mitchell waffled a bit and then said “I was just trying to get open myself but … couldn’t move, man.”
Couldn’t move. That was an admission. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a professional athlete say that before. And do you know how many incredible opponents have not put Mitchell into this state?
The Pacers won the series 4-1 and damn near won the NBA championship, losing in Game 7 to the Thunder only after Haliburton tore his Achilles.
The reason we keep writing about the way the Pacers won is because it’s the NBA’s new conundrum. I’m reading and watching a lot of commentary looking ahead to next year, and a lot of it is missing an essential ingredient. Next year’s NBA will be different. It’s no longer just about which team has the best players. In this case, the Cavaliers did!
It’s about which team can move, really move aggressively to make winning plays, when the playoff games are being decided.
Pacers coach Rick Carlisle just explained Indiana’s approach to Caitlin Cooper of Basketball She Wrote.
“We're playing a system now that's changing the game somewhat,” Carlisle says. “And you look around the NBA, two, three years ago, nobody was picking up full court during the regular season, you know, or or doing that kind of stuff. I mean, this was, this was unheard of.”
They’ve geared everything, Carlisle explained, toward high intensity. “It was going to be full court pressure. It was going to be physicality, persistence, you know, 94 feet, and that was just how we're going to, we're going to have to do business. And so now, now we're down the road with this team, and this is how we're building this team. And so, we're looking for pieces that fit our system.”
For most of the last twenty years NBA offenses have been built around the pick and roll. And Cooper points out that’s still the most common play. But it’s nothing like as common as it used to be. Teams are trying all kinds of new things, including the Grizzlies approach early last season with almost no picks at all. Carlisle says the league has gotten a lot better at defending that two-person pick-and-roll action. The mainstay of the league is waning. The future will be won by innovators.
The fun, Carlisle believes, is in getting five players flying around the court, making quick decisions on the fly with a “hot ball.”
That approach has another advantage: it wears out opponents. Carlisle notes that none of the Pacers play long minutes. “We play a lot of guys, and this is, this is a way for us to engage a lot of guys, try to keep our minutes reasonable and try to get into the legs of the opponent.”
If you’re wondering what “get into the legs” means, ask Donovan Mitchell.
Any normal person would think that what has to come next is that the Cavaliers need to work on their conditioning. There was a time when players showed up hungover, or as habitual smokers. For us regular folks, there are some clear ways to get fitter. More cardio will probably get us reliably better athletic performance.
But at the highest levels, everything is a tradeoff. Do you watch the Formula One docuseries Drive to Survive? Imagine the insanity of saying that the team with the car that came in fifth needed to work on having a faster car. Hundreds of people are decades into working on that, the answer is never as simple as make it faster.
What you need is a scalpel-level diagnosis of exactly what’s holding the car back. Every change you’d make to a Formula One car comes with a tradeoff. [Brace yourself for my attempting to sound like a race car engineer.] If you get more downward force in the corners, the car will skid a little less but will that hold back your top speed in the straightaways?
Everything is give and take. Donovan Mitchell had played 100 games, three to five a week, for eight months by the end of Game 2. Would he be fitter with more work, or less?
I wrote a book about this next part. Maybe there are ways to get Donovan Mitchell fitter and more robust. What should he do? That depends on his body.
Injuries mostly occur from landing, which is when massive forces impact the body in short amounts of time. Similarly, plane crashes tend to happen on landing. Coming down to earth can hurt.
P3 uses this video as training for NBA players. This might be the most aggressive bit of exercise that NBA players ever do.
Leaping over a row of boxes is super helpful in reducing the likelihood of injury if you have good landing technique like the guy in the video, whose name is Sanford Spivey. This is a matter of how your feet touch the ground, but also ankles, knees, and hips. If you're learning to fly a plane, it's helpful to land again and again if the landing gear is down. Jumping over those boxes with poor landing form is a stop-the-workout terrible idea. They won’t even let athletes attempt that at P3 without extensive assessments in advance. Many players workout at P3 for ages without graduating to these big jumps.
The big injuries come from crashes. The innovation that's going to lead to giant improvements in NBA injury rates, is that training those landings can do wonders for the body. Should Donovan Mitchell be landing hard right now? Depends how he lands! Donovan Mitchell either needs more work or less work, and it depends on biomechanics. If he has bad landing biomechanics, then he needs to fix that before he does more work. And if he has good landing biomechanics, then his body can take a lot, and it would be worth him exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible.
Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson is spending his summer marveling at the Pacers’ pace and intensity, and learning everything he can about overhauling the Cavaliers’ preparation so they won’t be caught flat-footed again. He has been reading my book and talking about customizing a preparation program, unique to every Cavalier, to get them ready for the blizzard of activity that will come from the Pacers, and the many teams emulating their style, next season.
Another thing is happening, too: as it happens, if you look at the public comments of coaches like Carlisle and Atkinson, you’ll notice they’re cooking up ways to keep their stars fresh, while wearing out opposing guards. Carlisle told Cooper a fair amount about the Pacers’ deep-bench guards: Quenton Jackson, RayJ Dennis, and Kameron Jones. The Cavaliers used a lot of summer league to see if Jaylon Tyson has what it takes to hound people all over the court while buying Mitchell the minutes he’ll need to play winning basketball at the end of playoff games.
It’s new NBA problem. It’s becoming, Carlisle says, a “play hard league.” Harder than ever.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
"He has been reading my book and talking about customizing a preparation program, unique to every Cavalier,"
You dropped that one very casually! If they apply the lessons by P3, could their number of injuries decrease as soon as this year or does it take longer ?