Today, the Cleveland Cavaliers have their first home game of the 2018-19 regular season, which should feature some fun Collin Sexton-Trae Young battles.
The Cleveland Cavaliers are probably going to have some really good showings from point guard Collin Sexton, and some where he looks like a rookie. The same goes for the Atlanta Hawks and Trae Young.
Both of those players were top ten picks in the 2018 NBA Draft, and both have lofty expectations coming into this season. This 6 P.M. contest today between the Cavs and Hawks might not be the most-publicized NBA game of the season, but a Sexton-Young matchup in stretches of the game figures to be noteworthy in itself.
Sexton had a tough go of it in his first regular season game against the Toronto Raptors, as he went just 2-of-7 from the field and had nine points, but had zero assists and four turnovers.
The following game, he got better as the game progressed, and had 14 points on 6-of-9 shooting, and didn’t turn it over against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Sexton is coming off the bench for the Cavaliers for now, while George Hill mentors him as the starter. In Young’s case, he’s started the Hawks’ first two games.
He’s put up 17.0 points on a 37.5 percent hit rate, to go with 7.0 assists and 4.0 rebounds in 33.0 minutes in his first two games.
Young should have a number of opportunities to make plays in pick-and-roll mismatches against Cleveland bigs such as Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson, and could lead to minimally-contested perimeter shots. Young is never afraid to let it fly, even from way behind the arc.
He has a more polished floater than Sexton after attacking closeouts, and better passing vision, too, although Sexton seems to be making good strides in both of those areas.
In Atlanta’s recent loss to the Memphis Grizzlies, Young did show an impressive variety of scoring and passing skills en route to 20 points and nine assists.
These two teams are going to want to push the pace as much as possible in this one, so this could lead to a ton of scoring. Both defenses have struggled to defend in transition with both wanting to instill an up-tempo style, which should lead to both Sexton and Young having plenty of opportunities for drives and pull-ups in the open floor.
Here’s some highlights of their meeting in college when Sexton was at Alabama and Young was with Oklahoma.
Both the Cleveland Cavaliers and Atlanta Hawks have given up too many open three-point shots, as Cleveland and Atlanta are in the bottom six in opponent three-point percentage, per NBA.com, so there should be a lot of wide-open basketball in this one. Look for Cedi Osman and Taurean Prince to be a good wing matchup as well.
That being said, this Young-Sexton matchup should make some fun battles to watch mid-game, and at times for 94 feet up the floor. So grab something to much on, while hopefully Sexton and the Cleveland Browns can make up for that brutal Ohio State Buckeyes’ Football L to the Purdue Boilermakers last night.