Cavs’ Donovan Mitchell: ‘We’re at that crossroad’

The Cavaliers entered the season believing the Eastern Conference was there for the taking.

They had just finished with the league’s best record a year ago, swept the Heat in the first round of the 2025 playoffs, and looked poised to make a deeper run behind Donovan Mitchell.

Instead, the postseason ended abruptly, with the Pacers knocking Cleveland out in five games.

Fast forward to now, and the expectations have collided with reality. The Cavs are 17-14 and sitting seventh in the East, squarely in play-in territory, hardly where most projected them.

Mitchell did not dodge the moment in his latest diary entry for Andscape, via Ashish Mathur of Roundtable.

“Mentally, we got to find it,” Mitchell wrote. “We’re 29 games in. We’re not a playoff team right now. We’re not playing like it. We have the talent. We have the group, but we’re not playing like it. And that’s on the 15 of us. We have to find it collectively.”

Mitchell went further, calling this stretch a crossroads.

“It can be some joy. It can be tactically. It can be spirit. It can be anything,” he wrote. “But we’ve got to find it… We’re at that crossroad, right? And now it’s on us to go out there and say, ‘Hey, we want to change this.’”

Statistically, Mitchell is doing his part. He is averaging 30.6 points per game while shooting 50 percent from the field and nearly 39 percent from three. Cleveland ranks sixth in the NBA in scoring. The issue has been on the other end, where the Cavs sit 20th in points allowed.

“When you’re in this position, it starts from within,” Mitchell wrote. “Collectively, one through 15, we’ve got to find a way to do the little things really well… Now we just need it to carry over to our results.”

There is still time. But as Mitchell made clear, time alone will not fix it.

The Cavs visit the Knicks on Christmas Day (noon EST).