Cavs: Darius Garland has fourth-highest odds to win Rookie of the Year

With the 2019 NBA Draft in the books, the odds for Rookie of the Year are out and Darius Garland is among the highest to win.

The 2019 NBA Draft was a big one for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and a big reason for that has to do with Cleveland selecting Vanderbilt lead guard Darius Garland fifth overall.

Garland, a talented player whose one collegiate season only lasted five games due to a reported meniscus tear, only had a five-game sample size at Vanderbilt, but his talent is clearly well-recognized, and he should a significant part of the Cavs’ future.

For now, according to BetOnline.ag and (h/t Ben Axelrod of WKYC), Garland, despite the small collegiate sample size, Garland is one of the top favorites to win NBA Rookie of the Year for the 2019-20 season.

Whether Garland can actually take the award away from the odds-on favorite in number one overall pick and Duke phenom Zion Williamson (now on the New Orleans Pelicans) remains to be seen.

That being said, Garland was the fifth overall pick, so him having the fourth-best odds at currently 10-1 (a successful $100 bet would result in a $1,000 profit, as Axelrod noted) isn’t a total surprise.

Nonetheless, nobody should expect Garland to win the Rookie of the Year considering that the Pelicans roster is much further along from getting what everyone believes is a generational player in Williamson, and the players the Pelicans got back in the reported Anthony Davis trade (which is still being sorted out by the way due to salary cap/matching predicated on Davis’ trade kicker, per The Athletic‘s Sam Amick) are good players.

Here’s the full details (though it doesn’t include the players New Orleans eventually selected this year but it’s quite a haul), per Andrew Lopez of the Times-Picayune, and taking the current return into account for Williamson, a player that is the overwhelming favorite to win Rookie of the Year anyway with 1/2 odds (you’d risk $200 to get a return of $100, as Axelrod noted), it’s really difficult to believe Zion won’t win the award.

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New Orleans is not likely a postseason team next year, but they’ll be competitive and winning significantly more games than the Cleveland Cavaliers and sometimes team success elevates one guy over the other.

I was a big fan of the Garland pick and if Garland didn’t get hurt, this could very well be viewed as a four-player draft instead of a perceived three-player draft, and Mike Schmitz of ESPN believes so and puts Garland in the same category of Zion, number two pick in Murray State’s Ja Morant (the player drafted by the Memphis Grizzlies), and number three in Duke’s Barrett (the player drafted by the New York Knicks).

In this clip, they start talking about it at the 1:50 mark, with ESPN’s Will Cain here on the “Stephen A. Smith Show,” and Schmitz also believes if Garland didn’t miss all but five games, there would be a legitimate debate which player was the better point guard prospect between Morant and Garland.

I don’t expect the Cleveland Cavaliers to win a ton of games next year, but I expect Garland to have a tremendous season and give Cavs fans plenty of excitement as the franchise-building block going forward.

Again I don’t expect a ton of success in terms of wins this season, but Garland will walk into the league with a tremendous handle, he’s terrific at creating his own offense, and he’s an outstanding shooter, and in particular, his dead-eye accuracy from outside is outstanding.

As we’ve emphasized here at KJG, Garland is a heck of a shooter both off-the-dribble and off-the-catch, as evidenced by him scoring 16.2 points per game on 63.9% shooting (including a 47.8% clip from three-point land) in that five-game sample (statistics courtesy of Sports Reference), and his playmaking and court vision is reportedly impressive for a young player, too.

I think he’ll make NBA All-Rookie First Team for the 2019-20 season and it wouldn’t shock me if he ended up third or even second in Rookie of the Year voting.