It’s been a minute since we’ve seen the Cleveland Cavaliers in game action. The 2021-22 campaign ended out for the Cavaliers in mid-April, as they then dropped their second game in the Play-In Tournament to the Atlanta Hawks, after Cleveland lost at the Brooklyn Nets a few days earlier.
For the Wine and Gold, it was a promising season, though, and it was one the team can build on from here. Despite a litony of injuries, the Cavaliers found a way to have 44 wins last season, which was their most by a Cleveland team without LeBron James in the fold since 1998.
Darius Garland emerged as an All-Star, Jarrett Allen also repped the then-hometown Cavaliers with Garland in the All-Star Game, and Evan Mobley was even better as a rookie than one could’ve anticipated coming into the season.
Ricky Rubio, who was brought back in the offseason, had a sizeable impact before his torn ACL, and could still when he’s back this upcoming season. Others such as Isaac Okoro, Dean Wade and Lamar Stevens made their imprints defensively, and it was nice to see Lauri Markkanen in a new role and new situation get better as last year wore on.
Looking forward now, it’ll be intriguing to see how Cleveland builds on last season, and hopefully makes a playoff push.
Collin Sexton, whether or not a new contract agreement gets done, would still bring quite the offensive punch next season I believe, and he seems healthy again coming off his torn meniscus which wiped out most of his last year. Hopefully Caris LeVert can find his footing at the outset of next season as well, when he did show better play as he got further acclimated; we’ll see as far as a potential extension there.
So, with this coming season getting here in a bit and the 2022-23 schedule being released on Wednesday (and you can see the printable schedule here), it led me to take a closer look at a handful of contests that jumped out in the first half of the schedule. In days to come, we’ll examine some key outings to watch in the season’s second half, too, as an aside.
Let’s get into the first half then, alrighty?
Here, we’ll take a glance at five games that jump out in the Cavs’ first half of the 2022-23 campaign.
We’ll start off with the season opener, as is customary.