The Cleveland Cavaliers could have shown up in February. J.R. Smith didn’t sign a new contract until two weeks before the season started. LeBron James is nearly 32 and coming off his sixth straight Finals appearance; he’s got serious mileage on him. Kyrie Irving has a habit of playing himself into shape as the season goes along. No one would have blamed them for looking sluggish coming out of the gate after an exhausted, euphoric downing of the Warriors last year, especially considering the Eastern Conference is theirs so long as they aren’t struck down by a spate of injuries. Fall basketball doesn’t matter for title-aspirant squads who haven’t experienced much roster turnover. It’s a period of getting everyone back up to speed after spending time with their families or vacationing in Mallorca. It’s tune-up ball. 

Maybe it’s Kevin Durant’s Oakland excursion or LeBron raging against his own mortality, but the Cavs have greeted this new year with furious purpose. They look as good as they ever have while also making subtle adjustments to their style. Kevin Love’s scoring is up and his three-point attempts are down, which is to say he’s getting more post touches after putting on some muscle over the summer. The team is leaning more heavily on Kyrie’s ability to score and LeBron’s ability to create for others. Iman Shumpert has been improbably valuable off the bench as a defender and spot-up shooter and Tristan Thompson looks comfortable in his first full season as the squad’s starting center.

Beyond that, the sourness that has characterized the Cavs since LeBron’s Cleveland return has disappeared. A title solves a lot in the short-term, and perhaps we’ll see some glowering later in the calendar, but the Cavs currently have the frictionless vibe of a collective that has finally solved some long-vexing issues. Plaster-grinned buddy-buddy Instagram poses have taken a backseat to what reads as genuine understanding. A couple nights ago, the Cavs finished off a tight game against the Hornets with LeBron plus a bench cadre of Shumpert, Richard Jefferson, Jordan McRae and Channing Frye. Tyronn Lue sensed something in that lineup and wanted to see if they could get the job done, which they did. No one was upset about it, neither Kyrie nor Love made any passive-aggressive post-game comments. This is the sort of experimentation you can get away with when there’s squad-wide trust.

The Los Angeles Clippers still have something to prove, technically, but they’ve taken on a weary, defeated air over the past few seasons. Though criticisms linger—they’ve never made it past the second round, the DeAndre Jordan-Blake Griffin frontcourt doesn’t totally work, Doc Rivers can’t find a decent wing to play in crunch time lineups—the Clips have, if not accepted their shortcomings, at least become beaten down by them, trucking along but never seeming like their self-belief is strong. It has looked like it might be the Clippers’ year several times during the Chris Paul era and each time they’ve either imploded or been bested by a superior foe. What were they going to do about a Warriors team they couldn’t beat even before they bolstered their squad with an MVP? 

All that weight upon them, and yet: the Clippers have been superb. It’s always been a bit puzzling why a team that features an excellent defensive guard in Paul and a violent rim-protecting freak in Jordan routinely puts up middling defensive numbers, but the Clps have relied primarily on their ability to outscore opponents on a nightly basis over the past few seasons. That’s no longer something to wonder about, since Jordan has found a new gear after his summer with Team USA. He’s the number one reason the Clips are holding drivers to 40.9 percent on shots around the basket. At age 28, he seems to have hit that point the very best paint-darkening centers reach where they know exactly what to do on defense and are still in full possession of their athleticism. 

More broadly, the Clips’ overall defensive improvement—they’re tops in the league by quite a bit, no matter which metric you want to use—has helped them get out and run with the ball. Their offense is now a mix of court-long sprints and more methodical play orchestrated by Chris Paul. Blake Griffin, in particular, is benefitting from more open floor touches. We’ve known for a long while that he’s a terrifying athlete with some subtle skills, but the breadth of his ability becomes completely apparent when he’s dribbling at a backpedaling defender. He’s this downhill-tumbling boulder who can crossover and lay the ball in, dump a pass off to a trailer, or find Jamal Crawford or J.J. Redick for a quick three. Outside of Russell Westbrook and LeBron James, he might be the most devastating transition player in the league.

It’s hard to figure what November teaches us, if anything at all. Teams in trouble have time to sort themselves and while the notion of peaking too soon is a silly one, it’s not exceedingly useful to play great ball when the games don’t mean much. If there’s one instructive thing we can glean from these first few weeks of the season, perhaps it’s that continuity, while not the deciding force in success, at least gives squads that have been together for years a basis upon which to experiment. When you’re certain what you can do with the players you have, you can riff on a proven formula, try to become something new without worrying that you’ll bring the whole enterprise crashing down. In the Cavs and the Clippers, we’re watching two squads who know they’re good but also know they’re going to have to be even better this season if they want to challenge the Warriors. All signs are positive so far; they’re both playing beautiful basketball. Whether it will be enough down the line is a far-off concern. For now, they’re enjoying the work they’re putting in.