Cleveland Cavaliers: Winning streak on the line vs the Boston Celtics
#2 thing to watch – the rotations
Head coach John Beilein has an interesting situation on his hands, he has to fill the 23 minutes that Clarkson played each night with the Cavaliers, per Basketball-Reference.
The coaching staff can go a few different ways today and moving forward. In the short term, it’s likely that the starting lineup will remain the same with Collin Sexton and Darius Garland sharing the backcourt.
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Rookie Kevin Porter Jr. will likely get a bump in his 21.2 minutes per game (per Basketball-Reference), off the bench.
We could also see Exum paired up with Garland in the backcourt quite a bit today to help out defensively.
For the long term outlook, it might be wise to slide Sexton into the role that Clarkson used to serve. Sexton is an excellent scorer and would immediately vault into one of the best bench scorers in the entire NBA and could give more scoring balance to all of the Cavaliers’ units moving forward
Elevating Porter Jr., who has been really good the last couple of weeks, into the starting shooting guard spot alongside Garland and having a bench backcourt of Sexton and Exum is very intriguing and may provide the most optimal rotations for the Cavaliers moving forward.
Sexton and Garland both are their most effective with the ball in their hands and probably should share the floor, less.
Regardless of what we see today from a rotations standpoint, they will likely continue to evolve as coach Beilein looks to pull the right strings with the current roster makeup.