Cavs: Stats predictions for current/potential small forwards in 2019-20

The Cleveland Cavaliers don’t have many players that are natural small forwards, as there’s really two on the regular season roster currently, and one other player invited to their training camp that I could see them playing in that role at some points during the 2019-20 season.

As was stated before a number of times here at KJG by many contributors dating back throughout the 2018-19 season, the Cleveland Cavaliers didn’t and do not currently have a good amount of natural small forwards/swingmen on the roster heading into the 2019-20 season.

The team does have a bunch of players that are predominantly guards (six in total) and has really five (and arguably six at times with two-way Dean Wade) players that could warrant a share of the minutes in the bigs rotation.

At the moment, though, there’s really only two players on the roster going into 2019-20 that are realistically decent fits playing the small forward/swingman or 3 position, and those are Cedi Osman, who is heading into his third NBA season (both of his previous two seasons were played with Cleveland) and rookie Dylan Windler, who played four seasons at Belmont.

Osman, who is currently set to be a restricted free agent after next season if the Cavaliers and him don’t agree on an extension before the start of 2019-20, had a strong year of growth as an NBA small forward last year, as it was in a number of ways, really his rookie year, as he was the team’s full-time starter at the 3 and played 32.2 minutes per game, as compared to his actual rookie year, when he played only 11.0 minutes per outing (per Basketball Reference).

Windler was the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 26th overall pick in the 2019 NBA Draft, and really proved to be an excellent shooter in college at Belmont, as he had career averages of 13.2 points per game on 66.3% true shooting (per Sports Reference) in three years as a starter.

Along with those two players, I also believe the Cavs will occasionally play reported training camp invitee Sindarius Thornwell some at the 3 because of his defensive prowess in being able to defend opposing wings at a high level, as he showed when given chances in his first two NBA seasons with the Los Angeles Clippers.

So in terms of 2019-20 statistics predictions for the current and potential (thinking of Thornwell) Cleveland small forwards, we’ll begin with the starter in Osman.