1 stud and 1 dud for Cavs in win at shorthanded Jazz

Cavs stud: Ball movement

Throughout this season, the Cavaliers have benefited from having great ball movement often in their games, and it’s played into them getting plenty of guys quality looks from ball swings, leading to open perimeter shots and/or mismatches.

In this Jazz game, that was fully on display. Cleveland had 28 assists at Utah to 13 turnovers, shot 53.1 percent, and the Wine and Gold were led by Darius Garland, who had his first career triple-double with 11 points, a career-high 15 assists, to go with 10 rebounds.

“DG the PG” was a key cog in getting guys such as Jarrett Allen and Lauri Markkanen a number of outstanding looks in the game, largely helping them have 12 and 20 points, respectively, and Markkanen, who has been off, was 4-of-5 from three. And Garland, Lamar Stevens (who had a career-best 23 points on 10-15 shooting), Kevin Love and the group in general essentially put this one on ice it seemed during at one point, a 21-0 run in the third quarter.

It was good to see the Cavs taking advantage of drive-and-kicks, plays in secondary transition after effective defense, and we saw some big-time passing from the likes of Evan Mobley, including some big-to-big feeds. Mobley had seven assists in this game, and was just consistently taking what the Jazz defense, shorthanded or not, gave him.

The Cavaliers will need Rondo to get healthier, obviously, but with the bigs involved in getting the ball rolling, and with Garland balanced, the Cavs are more than capable of ball movement like this, and if Markkanen and others are on, they can beat any team on any given night. That’s regardless of circumstances.

Alright, so even with this 111-91 victory, we do still have to touch on a Cavs dud from this one. So we’ll get into that next.