Cleveland Cavaliers: The top three driving threats in 2019-20

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Cleveland Cavaliers head coach John Beilein (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images) /

The Cleveland Cavaliers should be more efficient as drivers in the 2019-20 season than they were last year, and three names come to mind as their best driving threats.

The Cleveland Cavaliers were a team that drove the ball often in the 2018-19 season, but they were not a squad that was particularly efficient when doing so.

Cleveland, as KJG contributors have often discussed, did not have nearly enough spacing for the vast majority of last year to be all that productive in the paint last season.

I believe the team’s best player in big Kevin Love hopefully being healthier and appearing in many more than just 22 games this coming season (as he did last year, per Basketball Reference) mostly due to reported toe surgery, will help create more room for perimeter driving threats for Cleveland by dragging opposing bigs and possibly rim protectors out of the paint.

Though it was only a small sample size, Cleveland did have an offensive rating of 110.5 last season when Love was on the floor, which would have placed them a much more respectable 14th in the NBA last season if you scale to a season-long sample size (per NBA.com, and credit to frequent commenter Ryan Yankee for bringing up Love’s on-court impact).

Love was not active often, though, and that played a significant role in the Cavaliers having an offensive rating of just 25th (again, per NBA.com).

Again, I also believe Cleveland will be a much better driving team in the 2019-20 season than they were last season, when Cleveland had a 45.1% shooting clip on drives, and for reference, only six NBA teams shot worse on drives (per Second Spectrum’s NBA tracking data).

The three rookies the Cavs drafted in 2019 in guard Darius Garland and wings Dylan Windler and (via reported trade which we’ve often touched on) Kevin Porter Jr. should all play into helping Cleveland’s driving capability this year, too, and we’ll get into that.

So who are the three best driving threats for new Cleveland head coach John Beilein and the mostly-new coaching staff to deploy in the 2019-20 season and hopefully beyond?

Number three is coming right up.