Last preseason, Cleveland Cavaliers big man Evan Mobley was thought ready to take a big leap in his second season with his team. He was coming off a year where he was snubbed as Rookie of the Year and many NBA executives and others projected Mobley to have a breakout season. While the season was a good one for him, it wasn’t necessarily considered a breakout campaign.
While he improved in a number of areas, and demonstrated progress on-ball, he still was not the superstar player that could have helped his team win that opening playoff series against the New York Knicks.
To win in the NBA you need to have a collective group that can play well together and push through the difficult times. Unfortunately, the team was not ready for the bright lights of Broadway and stumbled when they had pressure on them.
Mobley is still very young and as he grows in strength physically he will hopefully mature mentally too in the coming years. The Cavs are banking on Mobley’s offensive progression, and recently the Wine and Gold’s General Manager Kody Altman shared those ideas and were shared recently in a great article summarizing those plans by our own King James Gospel contributor Caleb Crowley.
The one area that Mobley came to the Cavs with was his outstanding defensive skills and those will only get better too so let’s look a little more closely at the three reasons that this third season will be the one that really cements his importance to this Cavaliers team. If he hadn’t completely broken out yet, he’s about to put the NBA on notice that Cleveland doesn’t have just one or two stars, they have their biggest star ready to take the league by storm.
Reason No. 1: Leadership role
When Mobley first started with the Cavs, they had a very young team. They still are, but then the eldest player on the team was Kevin Love. With the trio of Darius Garland, Jarrett Allen and Mobley playing together that first season, they started creating good chemistry playing together.
Last offseason, the Cavaliers brought in Donovan Mitchell and he became the presumed leader of the squad because he was a veteran player and was an established star in the NBA already.
While Mitchell will be looked at to continue that leadership role, the other players will need to take on more accountability. Mobley is in a position now, because of his physical size and also because of the important role he plays on the team, to really take ownership of being a much more vocal leader of the team on and off the court.
Up until now, Mobley has been a somewhat quiet star on the team. He doesn’t talk a lot and lets his basketball skills do the talking. However, in the game of basketball, players need to communicate and take on more vocal leadership roles as they mature and Mobley will be expected to step up a bit more in that department.
Mobley was drafted by Cleveland to be the central figure in the team winning their next NBA Championship. It’s time now for Mobley to take that role and really run with it.