Who are the Cavs’ 3 best passers entering the 2022-23 season?

The 3 best Cavs’ passers entering 2022-23 – No. 2: Darius Garland

As for the Cavs’ second-best passer heading into this season, I have to go with Darius Garland.

Garland is one of the league’s best emerging guards, fresh off of a breakout campaign in 2021-22, in which he made his first All-Star Game and had 21.7 points and 8.6 assists per outing. That followed up a promising second year, when he had 17.4 points and 6.1 assists per game.

Garland has really started to come into his own as a pick-and-roll maestro, and this season, we should again see him and Jarrett Allen thrive in playing off one another. The lobs and pocket dishes he can make to Allen often leads to quality offense for Cleveland, and this year, I’d expect Garland to be able to find perimeter shooters more with the threat posed by his connection with Allen in that realm.

Garland also is fully capable of making wrap-around feeds from keeping his dribble alive in breaking down opposing defenses, and his vision to hit skip dishes makes things easier for guys such as Kevin Love off-ball, too. I’d expect to see that pay off for Mitchell as well, and we saw glimpses of that element in Cleveland’s narrow loss to the 76ers on Wednesday, albeit in preseason.

Granted, hitting timely feeds to perimeter shooters with more volume could be an area where Garland can be more consistent, but there have been tons of instances where he delivered those on-time and right to the shooting pocket of his teammates in the past two seasons.

Heading into his fourth year, he’ll continue to get better at that, and the threat Mitchell poses will only open up more passing lanes for Garland to hit those feeds, and where he can from a variety of different angles and launch points. Garland does need to cut down some on turnovers in those sequences, but with more help around him this season, and with more experience, I don’t view that as being much of a concern looking onward.

And lastly, this year, I’d expect to see Garland push tempo some more, and I’d think we should see more hit-ahead passes from him to players such as Isaac Okoro and Caris LeVert, among others.