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3 potential clutch lineups that the Cavs could run next season

By Amadou Sow

Cleveland Cavaliers wing Kevin Porter Jr. (left) and Cleveland guard Collin Sexton celebrate in-game. (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images)
Cleveland Cavaliers wing Kevin Porter Jr. (left) and Cleveland guard Collin Sexton celebrate in-game. (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images) /
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Collin Sexton, Cleveland Cavaliers
Cleveland Cavaliers guard Collin Sexton runs down the floor. (Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images) /

The Cleveland Cavaliers were decent in 2019-20 in regards to their clutch play, and they’ll look to keep building on that in 2020-21.

The Cleveland Cavaliers‘ 2019-20 season is over as they were not one of the 22 teams invited to Orlando for the season’s restart. With this, we can now access the season that the Cavaliers had.

While Cleveland could eventually join a second “bubble” in Chicago of non-Orlando teams where they could have four Summer League-type games before 2020-21, per a report from ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan that wouldn’t seem to have an affect on lottery odds.

So looking back at this now-past season for the Cavs (it’d seem officially), surprisingly, one area where the Cavaliers performed decently was their clutch play. According to the NBA, clutch play is considered when there are five minutes left in games, with the score going into that stretch within five points between the two teams.

Looking at statistics, in the clutch, the Cavaliers were about the middle of the pack in both offensive and defensive rating, ranking 14th and 18th respectively.

The Cavaliers played a more team-oriented game as stats suggest. This past season, the Cavaliers were 10th in assist rate in the clutch with a rate of 54.3 percent and were 12th in assist ratio at 13.7 percent, per NBA.com.

Lastly, it seemed the Cavaliers looked to slow the game down and let the team flow in the clutch rather than have players look to rush shots as this past season, they ranked dead last in pace in the clutch.

Looking at these statistics, the case could be made that these are taken out of context as most of the Cavs’ close games were against teams near them in the win-loss column. Despite what I just stated, the Cavaliers still had some impressive, clutch wins against playoff teams in the Miami Heat, Denver Nuggets and (currently) the Memphis Grizzlies.

The Cavs have a big offseason ahead of them and the moves they make will have strong implications on their future. Looking at next season, they will have many different lineups that they could run for next season, and we’ll touch on the clutch element for them.

Here, we will look specifically at three potential clutch lineups that the Cavaliers could run next season.

Now, we’ll examine the first of those three.