The Cleveland Cavaliers are the team to beat in the East
With the struggles of the top teams in the East, it's become clear that the quest for the NBA Finals runs through the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Cleveland Cavaliers are the team to beat in the East originally appeared on The Sporting News . Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here . At the start of the playoffs, it was fair to say that the path through the Eastern Conference was supposed to go through teams like the Detroit Pistons , Boston Celtics , and maybe even the New York Knicks .
They were the top three teams in the East to close out the regular season, and you'd think that every single one of them would roll into round two with relative ease. It's for that reason why they play the games. The third-seeded Knicks struggled to beat the sixth-seeded Atlanta Hawks , a team that is lacking the pieces necessary to make a legitimate playoff run.
Having traded away their star guard this season, Atlanta was in the midst of an improbable run that saw them finish well enough to qualify for the playoffs. No one took them seriously, though. That was until the Hawks took the Knicks to a 2-1 series lead after three games.
While the Knicks eventually rallied back and took care of business quite easily, the Hawks highlighted some real concerns in how the Knicks can be exploited on both ends of the court. The same can be said for the number one seed in the East, the Pistons , who only advanced because the Orlando Magic had a historic collapse in Game 6. The Magic scored just 19 points in the second half of Game 6, allowing the Pistons to rally back and win.