Steven Kwan isn’t reaching for alarm bells, even with the Cleveland Guardians staring at a 0-2 hole against the Chicago White Sox in the ALDS.
That calm comes with plenty of baggage. Cleveland has had to dig out of trouble before in the regular season, including this year’s six-game deficit to win the AL Central and last season’s historic 15.5-game climb to the same finish.
But the postseason has been a different story. The Guardians have dropped 13 of their last 14 games when facing elimination, a run that includes last year’s loss to the Detroit Tigers in the AL Wild Card Round.
Still, Kwan said the group isn’t pressing the panic button.
“We’ve had a ton of adversity throughout this year. We had a ton of adversity last year as well, so I think it’s just there’s no panic button.
We’re not trying to do too much. We just have to do it with a ton of focus, and we’re just gonna have a good day tomorrow,” Kwan said.
Cleveland’s path back starts with Game 3 on Wednesday, and the Guardians can at least point to one recent October comeback. In 2024, they were down to the Tigers in the ALDS before ripping off two straight wins to take the series, capped by a 7-3 victory in Game 5. That snapped an MLB-record 11-game losing streak in elimination games that stretched from Game 7 of the 2016 World Series against the Chicago Cubs through Game 5 of the 2022 ALDS against the New York Yankees.
The odds still lean heavily against them. Teams that lose the first two games of a best-of-5 series have been eliminated 89 percent of the time, with 83 of 93 failing to recover. The last club to erase that kind of deficit was the Yankees, who won three straight in the 2017 ALDS.
There’s another layer here for Cleveland, too. The Guardians also lost the 2024 ALCS to the Yankees in Game 5 before being knocked out by the Tigers last year after finishing ahead of them in the division. This season brings a similar setup, with Cleveland finishing one game ahead of the White Sox in the AL Central.
Chicago, meanwhile, carries a strange bit of history into the series as well. The White Sox have not clinched a playoff series at home in 120 years, since beating the Chicago Cubs to win the 1906 World Series.
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The debate gets interesting because both sides can talk themselves into the basketball fit, even if the idea lives entirely in hypotheticals. Cleveland would be weighing whether to move off a proven defensive anchor for a higher-variance offensive swing, while the Bulls would be asking how much patience they have for Buzelis to reach his ceiling. Nothing about this points to real negotiations, but it is the kind of thought experiment that exposes just how delicate the balance is when a team starts wondering whether its best long-term answer is already in hand. [Read more 🡒]
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Proctor has already drawn some attention from Kenny Atkinson, who recently pointed to the guards physical development as part of his progress, and that only adds to the sense that his timeline is moving in the right direction. Porter and Tyson, meanwhile, are still in the category of players whose next step could come from simple but important growth, including greater shooting aggression and more consistency. None of it is finished, but for Cleveland, the possibility that a few young players might meaningfully matter by 2026-27 is the kind of internal upside that can shape a roster more than any outside rumor. [Read more 🡒]
LeBrons Latest Health Concern Changes Clevelands Biggest What-If
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James reportedly monitors the problems daily as part of his training, and last season he missed about a month because of sciatica. For Philadelphia, the concern is obvious: availability always shapes everything around a player at this stage, from rhythm to lineup stability to the larger ceiling of the season. For Cleveland, it only sharpens the old question of how different things might have looked if this version of James, with all the wear and tear that comes with the miles, had been part of the present instead of another teams future. [Read more 🡒]