Cavs’ Brandon Goodwin is establishing himself as playmaking insurance

Goodwin looks to be quality playmaking insurance for the Cavs

As we noted, Goodwin did some get legit minutes last season in relief of Trae Young here and there, and in two seasons with Atlanta playing with them, he had 5.4 points and 1.8 assists in average of 13.0 minutes.

With the Cavaliers, though, with at times some expanded PT, he’s had more than respectable averages, given the circumstances, of 6.5 points and 3.6 assists per outing.

Plus, defensively, I can’t discount his point-of-attack efforts and heady rotational sense. It’s been a small sample size, but 1.2 steals in 17.9 minutes per appearance for Goodwin is nothing to sneeze at; of course, a career-best four of them in Cleveland’s last win at the Charlotte Hornets helped those splits.

When highlighting the playmaking, however, Goodwin has helped a good deal with Cleveland’s ball movement, and his timing in hitting sprayouts to shooters, whether it’s directly led to assists or not, has aided the team, leading to corner three attempts or quality looks.

He seems to be developing nice chemistry with guys such as Kevin Love and Dean Wade in that way, and as a counter to it, his post feeds/timing with getting bigs going has gotten better it seems when he’s had meaningful opportunities of late. In these past three games with Darius Garland out with back soreness, we’ve seen that on a number of occasions, and from there, Goodwin’s feeding of cutters and guys running in secondary transition has been on-point in some sequences, which has been encouraging.

That’s been a key takeaway since he’s been with the Cavs in the past month-plus, from my perspective.