Cavs: The good, bad thus far of Larry Nance Jr. starting stints

The bad for the Cavs: Nance’s shooting, lack of aggression as scorer at times

Simply put, in Nance’s interim starting role, he’s had his struggles as a catch-and-shoot player.

Nance has only hit 29.6 percent of his three-point attempts on the season, again, mostly in a starting 4 role. Those have been almost exclusively spot-up attempts, for reference.

Frankly, in this interim starting 4 role, Nance needs to knock more of those attempts down, and it’s been tough for him thus far, by and large. Jr. has hit only 33.3 percent of his corner triple attempts, which has been hardly what he did in that regard last season, when he hit 41.9 percent of those attempts.

Perhaps we’ll see some more shots out of the mid-range/short roll, where Nance has shown nice touch after pick-and-pops/off of jabs, to get him going more as a shooter in coming games.

Moreover, to me, at times Nance has looked a bit timid to let shots fly, which one can understand somewhat. When he’s looked to have confidence off-the-catch, it’s seemed to work out better for him, and it definitely did last season, when Nance hit a solid 35.2 percent of his three-point attempts overall.

Let’s hope we see Nance, given his much-improved handle, show more willingness to take opposing bigs off-the-bounce as a driver some more as well.

We haven’t seen that nearly as much as I would’ve expected in this interim starting 4 role, and that could feasibly get him to be more productive in the scoring realm. And the same could go for his output (8.5 points per outing) and overall shooting clip, which has been just 44.3 percent, which would be a career-low.

But, by and large, I’ve been satisfied with what Nance has provided to this point in his interim starting 4 role for the Cavs.