CLEVELAND — Editor's note: the video in the player above is from a previous story.
When the Cleveland Cavaliers take the floor against the Toronto Raptors on Thursday night, it will be for the franchise’s biggest game since LeBron James exited Cleveland in free agency during the summer of 2018.
If the Cavaliers win, it becomes difficult to see them missing out on the playoffs, while a loss to the Raptors creates a greater chance the Wine and Gold end up in the play-in, where anything could happen.
The fact that the Cavs have gotten to this point where they’re playing season-defining games late in March is an accomplishment that few saw coming. It’s been made possible by a number of things, but the leap that All-Star point guard Darius Garland has taken throughout this season is undeniably one of the biggest reasons.
Garland’s on-court production has increased in each of his first couple of seasons in the NBA, but the third-year guard has also seen his numbers within this season rise as well. Oddly enough, he’s also playing his first full NBA season after his first two were shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, Thursday night will mark Garland's 59th game played this season, equaling the number of games he played as a rookie before the season was prematurely ended for the Cavaliers.
Garland on the season has been terrific, averaging 21.4 points, 8.6 assists, and 3.3 rebounds per game while he’s shooting a career-high 46.7 percent from the floor on the highest shooting volume of his career. He’s been the best player on a team that features another All-Star in Jarrett Allen and the Rookie of the Year frontrunner in Evan Mobley.
Since the All-Star break, Garland has been even better, averaging 26.4 points per game to go along with 11.5 assists and 3.5 rebounds in almost 40 minutes a night. Garland playing his best basketball down the stretch of the season is a great sign the Cavaliers' present, as well as their future.
Garland, in addition to several other members of the team, are now starting to play in the biggest games of their young careers. Thursday night’s matchup in Toronto will be the most meaningful game that Garland has ever played in, and the same can also be said about Mobley, Lamar Stevens, and Lauri Markkanen. There will be lessons learned from these experiences, just as there should have been things the team could take away from Monday night’s loss to LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Teams in the NBA that make deep runs in the postseason don’t often reach that point right away. It’s a very rare thing for a team to win a championship -- or even reach the NBA Finals -- without taking some sort of beating in the postseason first. That hasn’t always been true in Cleveland, as the team went to four straight NBA Finals with James upon his return, but that’s the extreme outlier. The Milwaukee Bucks, who won the Finals last year, had multiple playoff humiliations before reaching the pinnacle, the same could be said of the Raptors before them, and even the Warriors before their dynastic run. Really, it’s true for any team in the last decade that doesn’t have James.
Starting that clock as early as possible and gaining as much postseason experience early on is the best thing that could happen for a team like the Cavs. Reaching the postseason in Garland’s third year and Mobley’s rookie year would be a huge boost for the team’s future hopes. It would place real expectations on next year’s team, and who knows after that.
Even if things don’t go as planned over the last 10 games for the Cavs, this stretch of basketball to wrap up the regular season is going to have a different feeling than what this team has felt before, and that’s going to be a great thing for the future of the franchise.