Winning while tired: A deep dive into Cavs brutal schedule

The Cavs opening schedule makes their 15-game winning streak even more impressive.

The Cleveland Cavaliers are 15-0. It’s incredible. It’s amazing. It’s every other superlative that you can think of. Only four teams in NBA history have ever opened 15-0. Only one team has ever done better. This is rarified air. And somehow, someway, it’s even more impressive than you think. Why? Because the Cavaliers are doing this while playing through an absolutely brutal schedule.

The Cavaliers have played 15 games without getting two days off in a row the entire season. They are playing tired. At the close of the Sunday games, only one other team in the NBA had played 15 games. Five teams have only played 12 games. Throw strength of schedule and favorable injury luck out the window. Runs like this very rarely happen. Any NBA team can go cold for a night. All 30 teams can also get hot. The proverbial “trap game” is a known concept for a reason. Schedule losses, emotional letdowns, and looking forward to bigger games are all real things as well. The Cavaliers appear to be immune to it all.

But how unusual is this stretch of games? How hard has this schedule been? This scheduled run ends Wednesday night. The Cavaliers play one final back-to-back, first on the road at Boston and then at home against New Orleans, before finally getting 2 consecutive days of rest. That’s 17 games in 29 days. But how rare is that? It’s rare.

Looking at the entire NBA schedule, only the LA Clippers ever play 17 games in 29 days. It’s unusual to even play 16. The picture below shows how many games every team in the league plays during any 29-day stretch throughout the entire season.

The frequency of games is about to slow way down for the Cavaliers. It will likely be slightly more than pictured above, as this analysis does not account for the NBA Cup games in December. You can see the lulls in game frequency caused by the NBA Cup and the All-Star break in the graph. But one thing is clear, the pace of games will never again match this opening stretch.

So just how difficult does a compressed schedule like this make it on the team? And just how impressive is it to go undefeated through a stretch like this?

Let’s examine all the quirks of a schedule that can make it difficult on a team. Travel days, back-to-backs, back-to-backs with travel in the middle, three games in four nights, and playing at a rest disadvantage all influence wins and losses. They’re also more common in a condensed schedule like this.

All of these concepts are represented by a bar in the picture below. Each bar shows the number of times this scheduling quirk occurs in the Cavaliers' entire 82-game schedule and then highlights how many times the Cavs have played in that circumstance in these first 17 games.

Again, this analysis excludes December NBA Cup games that are not yet scheduled.

After this upcoming back-to-back, the Cavaliers will have played 17 games representing 20.7% of the regular season. In those 17 games, they have played 25% of their back-to-backs. They’ve played 30.4% of their three-games-in-four-nights allotment. Thirty-three percent of the back-to-backs with travel in the middle. They’ve already done 25.6% of their scheduled travel. The Cavs have been less rested than their opponent four times already. That only happens 13 times this year. They have all 14 of their games where they get two-plus rest days beforehand still to come.

The Cavaliers are not only streaking. They are doing it while traveling and while tired. They are accomplishing it with their depth. Kenny Atkinson has the pulse of this team. He’s positioned the Cavs for this schedule from the start by keeping the core four’s minutes low. He’s prepared the role-players by giving them consistent runs throughout the entire year. Even with everything working, he has not been afraid to go to new lineups when the standard rotation looks tired and is not performing as usual. He has not deviated from his plan for rest days, such as the one for Donovan Mitchell against the Charlotte Hornets.

The Cleveland Cavaliers are making history. They are also positioning themselves for a dominant regular season run the whole rest of the way as the schedule slows down and becomes an advantage instead of a hindrance.