We’re a little more than halfway through the NBA offseason, as players will begin reporting to their respective team training camps by the end of next month. A few days after that we’ll get live game action as the preseason kicks up, and from there it’ll be no time at all before the regular season starts.

For the Cleveland Cavaliers, their preseason schedule will begin on the road against the Atlanta Hawks at 7:30 pm eastern time on Tuesday, October 10.

It’s been a busy offseason for both the Hawks and the Cavs, so they’ll have plenty of work to do in this exhibition contest as they get their new rosters up to speed. Here’s a look at what each team has done so far this summer, and how the matchup might pan out when they take the court together in less than two months’ time.

Previewing the Hawks

We’ll begin by examining the Hawks, as Cleveland area fans may have less of an idea of what their opponent has been up to this offseason. Funnily enough, even Hawks fans might not have much of an idea of what their team is going to do this season.

The team fired head coach Nate McMillan towards the tail end of last season after he’d failed to build on the success he enjoyed in his first year with the club: the Hawks went on a run to the Eastern Conference Finals during the 2021 NBA playoffs, losing to the Milwaukee Bucks, who ended up winning it all.

After they sputtered to 29-30 at the All-Star Break last year, though, the club decided it was time for McMillan to go. Atlanta jump started their search for a new head coach, hiring Quin Snyder just five days after McMillan got the pink slip. With a full offseason under his belt to enact his vision for the franchise (and his preferred assistant coaching staff now in place), it’ll be interesting to see just how well the team performs in their first game action against the Cavs.

We’ve already seen a snippet of Snyder’s potential, as he helped a middling Hawks team give the No. 1 seeded Boston Celtics a scare in the playoffs last season. With a retooled roster at his disposal, the Hawks could be a sneaky dark horse as the new season begins.

They flipped forward John Collins to the Jazz in order to get under the luxury tax threshold, acquiring a cheaper replacement in Mouhamed Gueye: Gueye may not be able to fill the void left by Collins right away, but his athleticism makes him an intriguing prospect.

All in all, it looks like the Hawks want to retool rather than rebuild as they prepare for the upcoming season, flipping older, pricer players for younger and cheaper ones, giving them the flexibility to swing a bigger deal should the opportunity present itself.

Previewing the Cavs

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the offseason moves that Cleveland made, with league pundits ranking their summer among the best in the NBA.

The Cavaliers struggled mightily in their first round loss to the New York Knicks in 2023, with dismal shooting on three point attempts dooming them in a series of low-scoring losses.

They went out and acquired a pair of excellent scorers in order to address that deficiency, Max Strus (who averaged 11.5 points per game off the bench last season) and Georges Niang, who scored 8.2 points per game in a similar reserve role.

These moves may not seem earth shattering, but they do quite a bit to open up the Cavaliers’ offense: if Donovan Mitchell is free to play his game rather than forced to try to do it all, that makes the team miles better from the get go. Supplemental moves to bring in specialized players who can complement existing talent helps the Cavaliers young core continue to improve without shaking up the roster in a big way or going for broke. David Aldridge, who covers the NBA for The Athletic, complemented the Cavaliers for not overreacting to their loss against the Knicks: New York posed a matchup nightmare for Cleveland because of the flexibility of players like Jalen Brunson, a 6-foot-2 guard who is an excellent defender despite his size and 7-foot tall big man Mitchell Robinson, who boxed out the Cavaliers in the paint on the way to a series-leading 49 rebounds.

Rather than making desperate moves after the lopsided losses, Aldridge praised the Cavaliers for keeping a cool head, continuing to build for the future rather than mortgaging it for a chance at immediate success: sometimes the best moves are the ones you don’t make.

But enough offseason talk: the preseason games are just around the corner, and if you are excited you might want to check out Ohio sportsbook promos to show your support for your favorite team.

Who Ya Got?

When it comes down to it, preseason games are something of a nightmare to predict. Even if one team is significantly better than the other on paper, each coaching staff operates on a different schedule in terms of how much (if at all) they want their top players to play, which games they want them to take part in and how much actual coaching they end up doing: whether that means they toy around with matchups to see if they can find success in an unorthodox way, or if they keep things as vanilla as possible so that they don’t tip their hand before the regular season starts.

Betting lines are often a good resource to use in determining which team has the edge in a given matchup, but Ohio sportsbooks aren’t going to release those until we get closer to the game.

That doesn’t mean we’re left entirely in the dark, though: the Cavaliers have much better odds of winning it all this season—listed at or around +2500 to do so—than the Hawks do, who fall in around +7500.

Even though the Hawks will have home court advantage, the Cavaliers should be an excellent pick to win once we get closer to live game action.