handy game-by-game TV schedule<\/a>.<\/p>\nFrom the opening tip, Cleveland\u2019s point-of-attack defense dictated the tenor. Hounding ballhandlers, shrinking space before Phoenix could organize. Every dribble felt contested. Every entry pass arrived a beat late. Behind them stood size and structure.<\/p>\n
With De\u2019Andre Hunter sidelined by illness, Kenny Atkinson leaned into necessity. He opened the second quarter with Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen together, trusting length and reliability over spacing. It worked. Phoenix struggled to turn the corner. Cleveland handled mistakes before they became problems.<\/p>\n
The Twin Towers finished the contest both with double-doubles. Mobley had 16 points, 10 rebounds, five assists and five blocks. Allen added 16 points and 11 rebounds. <\/p>\n
But one sequence in the first quarter captured the energy they showcased.<\/p>\n
Sam Merrill threw an errant backcourt pass that should have been a momentum-swinging disaster. Instead, it became a referendum on effort. Merrill elevated to protect the rim. Craig Porter Jr. and Donovan Mitchell chased into the frame. Phoenix earned multiple looks \u2014 and missed all of them. Mitchell secured the long rebound, fired ahead to Mobley, who had stayed upright and alert, and the play ended with a transition dunk.<\/p>\n
A mistake flipped into a statement. It wasn\u2019t isolated.<\/p>\n
The Cavs built a lead that ballooned to 20. It was loud. It was convincing. But it wouldn\u2019t last, at least not the whole way through.<\/p>\n
Atkinson warned pregame that the Suns would feel familiar. Jordan Ott, now running Phoenix\u2019s bench, shares the same basketball dialect. Same emphasis on effort. Same belief that games bend under pressure before they break under talent.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, the Suns are the hardest-playing team in the league right now,\u201d Atkinson said before the game. \u201cThey play harder than anybody. That\u2019s what I see. I\u2019m not at the game, but it jumps off the page.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phoenix took the early punch and kept working. The game slowed. Bodies hit the floor. The edges frayed. By the middle of the second quarter, Cleveland\u2019s margin had been sliced in half.<\/p>\n
This is where the afternoon could have slipped.<\/p>\n
Instead, Mitchell delivered the kind of moment that reminds everyone why the Cavs trust him with the wheel. <\/p>\n
With the clock draining at the end of the first half, he went coast-to-coast, full steam, through contact, through arms, through doubt. He finished the layup, drew the foul, then tumbled into the first row behind the basket, celebrating with the fans who had leaned forward with him.<\/p>\n
It was a message. Cleveland could match the Suns\u2019 physicality. Cleveland could survive the grind. Cleveland would not retreat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re having fun out there, honestly. It\u2019s a lot different,\u201d Mobley said postgame. \u201cEveryone\u2019s playing with energy. We\u2019re coming with pace every single time. Playing great defense and letting that defense turn to offense. Cavs basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Cavs jogged into the locker room up 13, the building buzzing but not settled or satisfied.<\/p>\n
That unease proved warranted.<\/p>\n
The third quarter reopened familiar wounds. Cleveland came out loose with the ball and loose with its discipline. Six turnovers in the period fueled a Phoenix run that felt faster than the Suns\u2019 season-long tendencies suggested. A team ranked near the bottom of the league in pace suddenly feasted in transition.<\/p>\n
Ten fast-break points poured in over the first six minutes, eclipsing Phoenix\u2019s entire first-half total.<\/p>\n
Once Phoenix got organized, the halfcourt problems compounded. Devin Booker and Dillon Brooks found their rhythm in isolation. Booker danced into his midrange comfort zone. Brooks bullied his way to the rim and into turnaround jumpers. Cleveland collapsed to help, then paid for it.<\/p>\n
The Suns buried six of their 11 three-point attempts in the third. Five offensive rebounds extended possessions that already felt draining. Phoenix took 27 shots in the quarter to Cleveland\u2019s 20. Every stop required extra work. Every miss hurt more.<\/p>\n
The 19-point cushion shrank to seven by the time the fourth quarter arrived, and Rocket Arena tightened with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought that third quarter, they started to get it,\u201d Atkinson said. \u201cWe started to turn it over. They start to reach and hitch in. We coughed it up, and it was just one stretch where it was like, man, and you can\u2019t have stretches like that in the playoffs. That\u2019s what I told the guys. It\u2019s good facing a team like this. It\u2019s so physical. But it was good we bounced back from that stretch where they kind of bullied us a little and we started coughing it up. But good we turned it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atkinson\u2019s response to that discomfort was revealing.<\/p>\n
To open the fourth quarter, the Cavs\u2019 head coach leaned into his youngest options, rolling out a lineup of Jaylon Tyson, Craig Porter Jr. and Nae\u2019Qwan Tomlin flanked by Jarrett Allen and Donovan Mitchell. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s probably the hardest thing,\u201d Atkinson said pregame about deciding who plays down the stretch. \u201cWe probably had two or three guys that deserve to finish the game the other night against the Spurs. And probably two or three of them could be upset, right?<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd those are really hard decisions. And then you got to have a lot of individual conversations with guys to make them understand, and this is about us. Sometimes you\u2019re going to finish, sometimes you\u2019re not. All those conversations are important to keep our team chemistry right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Against the Suns, the youngsters got their chance, and they made the most of it.<\/p>\n
The tempo immediately shifted. The energy spiked. Loose balls became shared responsibilities. Rebounds were chased instead of watched. The game started flowing again.<\/p>\n
Tyson hounded ballhandlers and crashed from the wing. Porter dictated pace without overdribbling, pressuring the ball while still keeping Cleveland organized. Tomlin \u2014 raw, fearless and decisive \u2014 played like someone unconcerned with the moment, which made him perfect for it.<\/p>\n
And crucially, the lineup didn\u2019t shrink Mitchell. It liberated him. <\/p>\n
With three young players doing the dirty work around him, Mitchell could pick his spots, read the floor and still be himself without having to manufacture every ounce of momentum. The six-time All-Star finished with 34 points, 10 rebounds, seven assists, two steals and a block.<\/p>\n
All season, when given opportunity, those three have raised the Cavs\u2019 intensity level. Whether Atkinson was pushed into the decision by Hunter\u2019s illness or finally leaned into what had already been earned hardly mattered. What mattered was the response.<\/p>\n
Cleveland\u2019s seven-point lead \u2014 fragile and familiar \u2014 ballooned to 16 with 8:15 left and then it just kept rising with every passing minute. <\/p>\n
The swing was powered by players who weren\u2019t part of the Cavs\u2019 rotation a year ago, players who injected belief.<\/p>\n
And in doing so, they made a case that will be hard to ignore moving forward: minutes in tight, competitive games shouldn\u2019t be reserved solely for comfort or r\u00e9sum\u00e9. They should go to the players willing to raise the temperature.<\/p>\n
As the final horn sounded, it wasn\u2019t relief that filled the arena so much as recognition. This team remains capable of dominance when its habits align. It remains vulnerable when they drift. The gap between the two can feel wide or narrow depending on the night.<\/p>\n
On this afternoon, with a new year waiting, the Cavs chose the harder path more often than not.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t perfect. It wasn\u2019t clean. But it was enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like early in the season we would face adversity and kind of crumble and these past few games we faced adversity and kept what we\u2019ve been doing the whole game,\u201d Mobley said. \u201cWe start out the game with energy and continuing that throughout, even if it was going our way or not. I feel like we got to keep that up and keep pushing through adversity and everything\u2019s gonna start to change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next<\/p>\n
The Cavs host the Denver Nuggets for their first game of 2026 on Friday night. Tipoff is set for 7:30 p.m. Eastern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CLEVELAND, Ohio \u2014 The calendar was ready to flip toward a new year after Wednesday afternoon\u2019s contest, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3791],"tags":[7,69732,6,2065,472,71320,4045,604],"class_list":["post-509516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-phoenix-suns","tag-basketball","tag-cleveland-cavaliers-2025-2026","tag-nba","tag-phoenix","tag-phoenix-suns","tag-phoenix-suns-2025-2026","tag-phoenixsuns","tag-suns"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115819028703220679","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}