Cavaliers have played at NBA-best .807 clip for close to 2 months
The Cleveland Cavaliers credit a practice for helping turn their season around.
Cleveland was mired in a five-game losing skid, was a game under .500 and struggling to stay competitive with LeBron James sidelined. James returned for a Jan. 13 loss to the Phoenix Suns, the Cavaliers' sixth in a row, but he participated in his first full practice the day before suiting up for his first game in two weeks.
The four-time MVP made his presence felt, lifting up the intensity of the practice after sitting out the longest consecutive game stretch of his career.
"If the competition level isn't good enough in practice, he'll switch and go to the other team and raise the competition," teammate Iman Shumpert said of James, according to ESPN's Dave McMenamin. "It's the little things that he does as a leader that make him somebody that's very, very respectable."
Cleveland has been the NBA's best team since that mid-January loss to the Suns, reeling off wins in 21 of its last 26 contests – including a 10-point victory over Phoenix on Saturday – to move 15 games over .500 with a 40-25 record, good for third in the Eastern Conference.
James has led the charge, resembling a fresher and more improved player following his return from knee and back strains that forced him out of eight consecutive, in which the Cavaliers won just once. The team has played at a league-best .807 clip since. His MVP-level play, coupled with shrewd in-season pickups of Shumpert, J.R. Smith and Timofey Mozgov has Cleveland mere percentage points behind the Chicago Bulls for first place in the Central Division.
The Cavaliers have the league's most efficient offense during their hot stretch, the top true shooting percentage and have rebounded the ball better than any team in the East outside of the Washington Wizards. Cleveland has beaten opponents by an NBA-best average of 10.6 points, while holding its competition to the fifth-lowest field-goal percentage across the league.
It's been a dominant stretch, led by the game's most dominant player, and it was a random January practice that many on the team believe propelled the turnaround.
"It was probably our best practice of the year, and we all felt it," James said. "It was my first time coming back, and I wanted to set the tone that I was back and this is what I'm about and this is how we're going to play moving forward. So, it was a big step for our team that day."