Cleveland Cavaliers: 3 key takeaways from Isaac Okoro’s rookie year
By John Suchan
When you have a young Cleveland Cavaliers squad, that has been losing a lot, especially recently, having gone 1-9 over the last two weeks of play, it’s difficult to find those silver linings in the story. Injuries haven’t helped the Cavs’ efforts, though, objectively.
Albeit with the Cavaliers there are many positive things to consider as they play out their remaining eight games, one of those being rookie forward Isaac Okoro.
When examining Okoro’s rookie season for the Cavs, though, three takeaways jump out.
We’ll get into those three here for the young wing, beginning with the first takeaway.
Takeaway #1 from Okoro’s rookie year for the Cavs: Consistencies
Okoro has started all his 59 games active to date. It’s nice that he has maintained his health mostly. It’s also nice to only be a young 20-year-old. Okoro hasn’t lit up the traditional stat sheet, as the season has worn on, but he has shown some consistencies that will improve with his game.
For the season he’s averaging 8.6 points, 2.9 rebounds and 1.7 assists. In 27 games he has scored more than 10 points. His high mark was a 20-point game this past week in a game at the Toronto Raptors, in which the Cavs lost 112-96.
Okoro doesn’t put shots up like the other starters, such as guards Collin Sexton and Darius Garland, but he has been pretty consistent in getting eight to ten shots up a game.
This is an area next season that the Wine and Gold will expect more production from Okoro. There were far too many games where he was only getting four to six shots up a game and that can’t help the Cavs moving forward. A lot of this has to do with this being his first season in the league, being only 20 years old and having seemingly minimal confidence in his offensive talents for the most part.
Considering he’s been the most consistent starter in playing games, I would have thought, by this point in the season, Okoro’s numbers would start to rise overall. With players like Sexton and Garland out with injuries recently, I thought that Okoro would take more chances to lead the team.