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.
No. 2 reason: Improved shooting skills from the perimeter
Over his first two seasons, Mobley improved in most statistical categories including his percentage of made baskets. He went from 50 percent on made field goals made to 55 percent. His three-point shooting took a bit of a dip but his two-point shooting increased from 54 percent to 60 percent on makes.
He took an extra 117 shots over his rookie campaign and still increased his shooting mark. That’s a good indication of his growth as a shooter. He took an extra 10 three-pointers too but that number dipped some. I imagine with the team adding a few more excellent shooters through the free agency market including Maz Strus, that will give Mobley more time to make shots from the outside and beyond the arc with more consistency.
He has hesitated in these first two seasons in taking that outside shot, but if he can gain some confidence with it, and knock down a few three-pointers early in the season that will only make his threat on the inside even more deadly because the defense will have to respect his shot if there’s some track record there.
Mobley is really just finding his groove in the league and with time will establish that outside jumper. I think that we will see a big increase in the number of three-point attempts taken by Mobley this season.
Interestingly from looking at the numbers from last season, outside of the shot right at the rim, which Mobley shot at 82 percent, his next-best percentage last season was from shots outside 16 feet at 47 percent. It dropped to 22 percent beyond the three-point line. If he’s been practicing this offseason, then that percentage number beyond the arc will show a big increase this next season.
No. 3 reason: Cavs building the team around him
Probably the biggest reason that Mobley could have that breakout year is because of his new role that general manager Koby Altman touched on recently, as we alluded to earlier.
The gist of Altman’s conversation this offseason about Mobley and his improved role on the team had to do with the idea that the team is going to make it a priority to play the youngster more at the 5 spot and have the offense work through him. The team went out and found better shooters including Max Strus and Georges Niang and with better floor spacing Mobley will be able to make better passes and allow himself to get more easy looks as the outside shooters for the Wine and Gold knock down shots.
The team will focus more on Mobley being the centerpiece of the team for stretches and try and get away from Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell being the players that opposing teams are most worried about.
The Cavaliers are hoping that Mobley can be the starting point of the offense and help push the tempo of the team, to some degree it seems. They don’t plan on scoring 55 points in a quarter like the Golden State Warriors did a year ago, but they do seemingly want to play faster, which Mobley can fit well into.
After he gets the boards the team will have shooters like Strus, Mitchell and Niang getting up the floor for spot-up threes. The team envisions Mobley being the leader of the squad with the ball flowing through his hands as the team looks to score buckets.
Your best players need to touch the ball on most offensive possessions and with that being the goal this next season of the team, look for Mobley to truly have that breakout season.
The beautiful part of Mobley and his evolving role with the team is that he will only get better and the Cavaliers can build their team around the big man’s talents and not all teams in the NBA have that advantage.