3 Cavs players to watch during their upcoming 6-game Western road trip
By Dan Gilinsky
3 Cavs players to watch during their upcoming West road trip: #2 – Lauri Markkanen
The second Cav I’ll be paying close attention to is Lauri Markkanen. Markkanen has been somewhat underwhelming for Cleveland this season as a deep threat, as he’s connected on a career-low 30.5 percent from three-point range, and after a very encouraging stretch of games last month, has been in a slump.
In Markkanen’s last 10 games, he’s connected on just 9-of-48 deep attempts, an 18.8 percent from three-point land, and has had 11.7 points per contest in that span. With plenty of those being pretty darn open attempts, it’s been rough to watch from a player that hit 40.2 percent from three last season with the Chicago Bulls, which was the best deep shooting clip he had in four seasons with them.
Granted, Markkanen not having the likes of Ricky Rubio or Darius Garland as great distributors in a batch of games last week reportedly played some into that, but thankfully, Rondo can I’d think, and having Garland back will. Point being, Markkanen needs to start demonstrating some more consistency as a catch-and-shoot threat, as he’s more than capable of doing.
His shooting abilities still makes him a meaningful floor spacer though, and I acknowledge that Markkanen’s role changing offensively while playing often with two other bigs has been an adjustment for him. That’s fair to mention.
On a positive note, Markkanen has done some really good things inside the arc, as a post-up threat at times, cutter and pull-up player off of hard closeouts in this rough stretch from three. And on this upcoming West road trip, him generating free throw opportunities could help get him out of this funk, to some degree, and maybe if and when doubles do come, we can see more solid big-to-big dishes to him to Evan Mobley, Jarrett Allen or Kevin Love.
The overaching them here, though, is that overall, Markkanen needs to provide more for these Cavs, who signed him to a fairly sizable four-year deal this offseason, in which he was acquired via sign-and-trade.
He did have a better stretch following missing a few weeks due to COVID-19 protocols from Nov. 22-Dec. 15, when he had 14.6 points per game, and hit 38.6 percent of his threes. So hopefully the dude gets going again here, as the Cavaliers need it. That would only make Kevin Love’s bench contributions even more meaningful in stretches, too, as he’s been scorching hot, as KJG’s John Suchan alluded to.