It’s becoming harder and harder to follow the Cavaliers these days.
They are just about about out of the race for even the playoff play-in game. They are missing leading scorer Collin Sexton (concussion). They have had some serious struggles defensively — and overall, the Cavs (21-39) have lost five of six.
In Sunday’s road game vs. the Washington Wizards, they led by eight points in the fourth quarter, but ended up losing by nine. Now, they pay a visit to the Toronto Raptors, who are playing home games in Tampa, Fla.
On the bright side, Darius Garland (28 points, nine assists) has been running the team very well, seemingly doing an even better job of it when Sexton is out. That’s not a shot at Sexton — it’s just the reality of it. That’s just Garland being impactful even when he doesn’t have his running mate.
But for the third straight year since LeBron James departed for the Los Angeles Lakers, the Cavs’ direction remains iffy. And if not their direction, the idea that they will be competitive again anytime soon.
Clearly, this is a team that’s screaming for some veterans. Instead, the Cavs are headed back to the lottery, where the majority of top players play the same position in which they are currently developing talent and affording all their minutes. That would be guard (Garland, Sexton) and small forward (rookie Isaac Okoro, who is promising, but who is very clearly still learning the pro game).
Now, those are the less-than-positives.
But if you’re going to focus on the future, there are worse places to start than Garland.
Some highly respected voices outside the organization have told FortyEightMinutes that the more the ball is in Garland’s hands, the better the odds are of the Cavs’ course changing for the better, and quickly.
“He was doing it all. He was a lead guard,” Cavs coach J.B. Bickerstaff told reporters of Garland. “He was asked to score, he was asked to distribute, and play both ends of the floor, and I thought he was excellent tonight. Anytime you make teams have to make an adjustment on you, that means you’re doing the job. And I thought that he was great tonight in taking that load and carrying that burden.”
Garland, 21, is averaging 22.4 points, 7.1 assists and shooting 44 percent on 3-pointers over the last nine games. While his defense leads something to be desired (it usually takes young players three years to learn how to defend in this league), he has been making up for it by resembling the true point man the Cavs always assumed he’d become.
Plus, Garland is finally healthy — which was not the case last season as a rookie, or the year before that, when he was a freshman at Vanderbilt.
Question is, can Garland be at his best next to Sexton? That doesn’t mean the answer is “no.” It just means the Cavs still have no definitive answer.
And so it goes. Another season of development and another offseason of trying to find the right pieces — both veteran and otherwise — to try to get it figured out.
