How Harden has changed the Cavs
The Athletic NBA Daily
The Athletic
4.1 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
Dave DuFour and Es Baraheni are joined by Justin Rowan of the Chase Down Podcast to discuss the Cavs post trade deadline. How has James Harden changed the Cavs offense? How will they be different come playoff time? What are the defensive concerns come playoff time? And then….. will LeBron come back to Cleveland this summer?
Host: Dave DuFour
With: Justin Rowan and Es Baraheni
Producer: Andrew Schlecht
Audio/Video Producer: Carl Finocchiaro
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily, presented by Amazon Prime for February 17th, 2026. |
| 0:12.2 | I'm Dave DeFore here with Esperi Hennie and Justin Rowan. |
| 0:15.4 | Coming up, Big Cavs talk today. |
| 0:17.8 | We're going to sit down with Justin Rowan and look ahead to the future of the |
| 0:21.3 | Cavs, what they might do in the playoffs, and whether LeBron James is coming this summer. |
| 0:32.0 | Good morning, everybody. What's up, As what's up, Justin Rowan? Welcome to the show. Justin Rowan, one of the hosts of the Chase Down podcast. He covers the Cleveland Cavaliers. Hope you guys had a good All-Star weekend. I did. By the way, Justin, you're wearing a Jasper Canada shirt. I'm wearing a Jasper shirt. Like, this is basically, you know, the podcasters uniform. Are you bribing me here with just a bunch of Canadian stuff on it? And we got sea bears. |
| 0:57.4 | We got sea bears underneath, man. So I'm doubling down. I'm pandering to you. I'm trying to make sure that this is a friendly reception here. And also to make sure that Dave feels threatened. That's a really important part of this equation. Yes, I'm very threatened by Canadians. |
| 1:12.7 | It's that maple leaf on your backpack to hide the fact that, you know, or to cover for the fact |
| 1:17.5 | that you're not American. Right. That really scares me. Yeah. Okay. Are the calves scary to you now? |
| 1:23.5 | I think to some extent, yes. So my biggest concern with the shakeups they did at the trade deadline is anytime |
| 1:30.7 | you see a seismic shakeup like this, how often do those teams make the finals? |
| 1:35.5 | Forget go out and win the NBA finals. |
| 1:37.5 | So to some extent, I'm concerned about that, right? |
| 1:41.0 | Like, I think this is going to be a team that's very, very good down the |
| 1:44.7 | stretch. They have an incredibly easy schedule after the All-Star break. There's a couple weeks here |
| 1:50.2 | where they're playing some other contenders in the Eastern Conference. They play OKC, but we'll see |
| 1:55.0 | who's available for that. But after that, it's a very, very light schedule. So this is a soft |
| 2:00.2 | landing for them. |
| 2:01.8 | But when they get tested in the playoffs and you don't have kind of that chemistry and |
| 2:06.8 | continuity like you had in the past, I'm curious about how that's going to shake out. |
| 2:12.2 | But I do think the one aspect that is encouraging for me is I don't feel like it's a major shakeup from a |
| 2:18.5 | style of play standpoint, right? |
... |
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