If you want to understand the Cleveland Cavaliers stumbling their way through the month of March, you probably need to start with Darius Garland.
The Cavaliers erupted to a 15-0 start and a blazing record through the end of February, driven in large part by a bounceback season from Darius Garland. The point guard refound his shooting stroke, had more energy on both ends of the court and returned to the All-Star Game. There was a long stretch of the season where it was reasonable to say that he had been a better offensive player than Donovan Mitchell.
That is no longer the case. Garland has entered into an extended slump and with him Cleveland's offense has begun to sputter. A sort stretch of schedule to begin March masked the issues, and then a West road trip shined a spotlight onto them. Once 56-10, the Cavaliers are now 60-15, having gone 4-5 over the last two-plus weeks.
While not the only reason for their shaky level of play, Darius Garland deserves a lion's share of the blame.
Darius Garland is in a slump
It's always dangerous to look at too small of a sample size for any data set, and for players their performance in a game or two or five is merely too small of a sample to trust. Even Stephen Curry shoots 20 percent from three some weeks; he then often follows that up by averaging eight threes per game and hitting 60 percent of them for a week. The true player is somewhere in the middle.
For Garland, therefore, we are going to take a large sample -- 20 games, or one quarter of the season. Garland has played in 70 games this season, so that means we can compare his first 50 games to his last 20. The results are not encouraging for fans of the Cavaliers.
In his first 50 games, Garland averaged 21.9 points per game while shooting 55 percent from 2-point range and 43.4 percent from distance. In his last 20 games? Those numbers swoon, falling to just 17.6 points per game and a frigid 45.8 percent from 2 and 32.9 percent from three. Overall, his true-shooting percentage is down 12 percent over his last 20 games.
The good news is that the rest of Garland's game is not suffering overly much. He is averaging similar assists and turnovers, and his rebounds and steals are actually up. The problem lies with his shooting; the ball simply is not going into the basket.
NBA.com won't allow me to slice the last 20 games, but in the last 15 the Cavaliers -- holders of the No. 1 offense in the league for the full season -- are down in ninth at 118.6, with a pedestrian +3.9 net rating overall. They are clearly not at their best.
The Cavaliers have to hope that Garland recaptures his shot. If not, at some point he will either shoot them out of a series, or Kenny Atkinson will need to shift some of his minutes to Ty Jerome. Both are difficult outcomes and both are problems for a Cavs team with lofty goals.
Garland is shooting 39.3 percent from the field and 32.6 percent on his 3s since the ASB.