The Whiteboard: Are the Cavs and Thunder peaking too early?

The Cleveland Cavs and Oklahoma City Thunder have had charmed seasons, but we’ve got to ask …

Did they peak too soon?

Peaking too soon is a pretty divisive topic. After all, what’s the alternative? Don’t try to play your best too early? Try and time it just right for you to play your best?

Conversely, there’s evidence that the strongest indicator for postseason success is correlated with performance midseason, and not early or late season success.

(The Dallas Mavericks stand as a great counterpoint or outlier for this after their post-All-Star surge led them to a Finals appearance last year.)

However, the NBA is about managing your regular season so you have a good seed but enough left in the tank for the postseason while also building championship habits to be good enough to win when it counts.

This creates a problem for teams who get off to outrageously good starts. You want to keep the good times rolling but that might take a little more energy. And that energy costs you later.

You’re also probably in a high-outcome band of things like shooting variance and turnover luck. When those things start to fade, can you tighten up the rest of your performance?

So what happens if you’re playing your best ball in January?

I took a look at best net rating per Basketball-Reference through the first 41 games, with data going back to 1978.

The best team in net rating through the first 41 games was the 2016 Spurs. That team was awesome with Kawhi Leonard and in any other year would have been primed for a 1-seed … but the Warriors existed and the Spurs ran into the Thunder who put together their season late.

(Notably didn’t peak too early!)

The final count? Of the top 20 teams in net rating at the halfway, two are from this season, the Cavs (20th) and Thunder (4th).

Of the eighteen remaining, nine won the title, and nine didn’t. If you told any of these teams they had a 50% chance of winning the title, they’d take it.

(Also proposes an interesting question given that there are two this season. The last time we had two in one season was that 2016 season… and neither won the title.)

The numbers don’t indicate that being this good this early means you’ll win the title … but they don’t indicate you’re likely to fall apart, either.

The 2014 Pacers are a great example, they land No. 23 on this list. The Pacers were dynamite through the first 41 games, going 33-8. They started to stumble a bit before the All-Star game. They were fine in February and then went 8-10 in March.

They never got back to where they were midseason, eventually losing in the ECF to LeBron and the Heat.

The 2015 Hawks were 33-8 (but only plus-7.8 in net rating). They were playing inspired team basketball, going 17-0 in January. They finished 20-14. By the time they reached the ECF vs., you guessed it, LeBron, they had no gas left in the tank.

The Cavs and the Thunder both profile as better than those teams by margin under the hood. But the Cavaliers’ defense is a little suspect and just lost three in a row. The Thunder offense is very sketchy and seems to clamp in big games.

It would be a great story for these teams to keep up their great starts and cement themselves as all-time teams.

But you have to wonder if maybe they reached their apex just a little too soon with six more months of basketball left for the champion.

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NBA news and rumors:

• Speaking of that Cavs’ 3-game losing streak, that came at the hands of the Rockets who beat Cleveland for the second time this season. The Rockets are 8-2 in their last 10 and Amen Thompson is turning heads. Houston plays Boston on Monday night.

• Jusuf Nurkic told reporters Saturday that a. he has no relationship with Mike Budenholzer and b. he does not expect the Suns to be able to trade him.

• In the lone Sunday game during the NFL Conference Championships, the Thunder bested the Blazers by 10. Good news, though, Portland is finding some keepers with Deni Avdija and Toumani Camera.

5 random stats (Minimum 160 attempts each, around four per game):

• The Bucks have the third-, fifth-, and sixth-best eFG% in the league with Taurean Prince, AJ Green, and Gary Trent Jr.

• Jordan Poole has the best eFG% in the league at 63.9 percent.

• Jalen Green has been the best transition scorer, averaging 1.32 points per possession.

• Zach LaVine has been the best ISO scorer in the league, averaging 1.14 points per possession.

• Josh Hart has recovered the most loose balls on defense this season, at 35.