Donovan Mitchell scored a season-high 36 points and the Cleveland Cavaliers defeated the Chicago Bulls 119-113 on Monday night, becoming just the eighth NBA team to start a season with 12 straight wins.
Darius Garland scored 17 points for Cleveland and Evan Mobley had 15 points and 11 rebounds. The Cavaliers scored at least 110 points for the eleventh time this season. Their 12-0 record is the best start to a season since the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors, who started their season 24-0. That Warriors team finished the season 73-9, another record, although they lost the NBA Finals to… the Cavaliers.
“It’s great to be a part of history,” Mitchell said. “I never want to take those things for granted along the way if we do it in different ways. We do it in a way where we blow teams away. We win from behind. We win close games. And every night it’s someone else in charge. It is always a group effort.”
Garland rolled in a layup with 24 seconds left, and Mitchell made two free throws to close the game.
Zach LaVine scored 26 points for Chicago, which lost for the fifth time in six games. Coby White and Nicola Vucevic each had 20 points. The Bulls opened a nine-point lead with 4:26 left in the third quarter before Cleveland rebounded late for a second straight game.
Five of the other seven teams that started a 12-0 season will advance to the NBA Finals.
“This group is locked in,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said. ‘I think it is [been] questions about this group, can they go to the next level, can they take the next step? So I think if you have that, you have that chip [on your shoulder]you concentrate even more. There’s a different level of concentration, a different level of focus, a different level of detail that these guys are using to get us to 12-0 so far.”
Atkinson is in his first season with Cleveland and Mobley credited him for the changes he has made to a team that lost 4-1 to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season.
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“Kenny did a great job convincing everyone,” Mobley said after the match. “We knew the defensive system was coming, and he had a plan of attack for us that he wanted to work out. And he recovered that very well, and I feel like everyone bought in right away. Since then we have only gone further.”