The Cavs have some nice contributors.
The Cavs aren’t like most teams that are in the bottom of the standings. Most of the teams are there because they have fully embraced the youth movement and have little to no veteran contributors. The Phoenix Suns, Atlanta Hawks, Chicago Bulls, and New York Knicks are all playing young players and are allowing them to make mistakes on the fly.
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The Cavs aren’t really in that position. Cleveland has a roster full of contributors, but they don’t have a guy to run the show with LeBron James on the Los Angeles Lakers now. The idea was to run things through Kevin Love but that plan never got off the ground due to his toe injury. This leaves you with a team full of contributors that usually can’t win on their own, but have the skills to be good if they’re in the right situation.
Those contributors all carried the Cleveland Cavaliers to the win against Indiana. Rodney Hood did a great job of aggressively looking for his shot as he put up 17 points. Alec Burks contributed 14 points and two blocks as he brought the intensity on both ends of the floor. Jaron Blossomgame put up seven points and eight boards in limited minutes, and Matthew Dellavadova continued to captain an over-achieving second unit as he added 10 points and four assists.
General manager Koby Altman is going to explore every possible avenue he has to acquire the most future assets he can while keeping the core of Love, Thompson and Sexton (per Sam Amico of Amico Hoops), and likely Nance and Cedi Osman. Fortunately for him, the Cavs’ role players have been stepping up big recently. Many of them have shown that they have the ability to be solid contributors on a contender if the Cavs chose to go that route.