21–22 NBA Previews: The Cleveland Cavaliers (#26)
A given NBA roster at a given NBA moment exists at the intersection of a wide range of continua. Is the construction of the roster tilted towards the prioritization of offense or defense? Is the team young or old? Is the team big or small? Does the roster hew to traditional modes or the contemporary moment? These questions are frustrating precisely because they are unanswerable. Or, if they aren’t unanswerable, they are ultimately meaningless. Success is wild and fleeting and cannot be guaranteed solely out of adherence to any particular set of philosophical guidelines. But that’s success. Hopelessness might be a bit more static. A bit more predictable.
All of this makes me want to root for the Cavs. I want to root for the Cavs precisely because conventional wisdom has told me in no uncertain terms that the construction of their roster is currently doomed and has been doomed from its earliest, cooing moments of babyhood. I’m referring here, of course, to SexLand, the backcourt combination of Collin Sexton and Darius Garland, two guards with plenty of offensive wiggle and very little size.
Your mileage may vary on this, but Sexton and Garland seem to me to be promising players. Both guys can score, and Garland’s facility as a passer makes up for some of Sexton’s tendency to be a bit of a gravitational singularity once he gets the ball. The problem here isn’t talent; not exactly. It’s tempting to say the problem is defense. That’s more accurate, but even that isn’t a perfect description. Really, the problem is in the bodies themselves. Sexton and Garland each are listed at about 6’1” and 190 pounds, and that simple fact alone probably means their viability as a combination on a winning basketball team is doomed.
It’s fair to ask lots of questions here. I hate writing about heights and weights. I hate that this sort of cold calculation means anything. Basketball, as far as I’m concerned, is far more subject to weird kinds of emotional alchemies than it is to this kind of simple input/output analysis. Still, the archetype of Two Little Guards is a fraught one, and there’s just no good way of getting around it.
Most recently, we’ve seen the Trail Blazers attempt to build a contender around Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. They haven’t come close, and from the very beginning there have been questions about fit. Teams with Two Little Guards have won titles. The 2019 Raptors played Kyle Lowry and Fred Van Vleet, but those dudes are fire hydrants, and their games prioritize defense at least as much as offense. Same with Isiah and Joe D on the Bad Boy Pistons. You could go back to Gus Williams and Dennis Johnson on the ‘78 Sonics, but DJ was one of the best defenders of his era, and 6’4” is probably big enough to exist outside the parameters of this discussion.
One thing that is interesting about the Cavaliers is that they aren’t unaware of this. They used a lottery pick last season on Isaac Okoro, a big wing who tilts heavily towards defense. They drafted Evan Mobley this year in the hopes that he might be the kind of versatile big who can cover up defensive mistakes and structural disadvantages all over the floor. Still, looking at this roster, it’s hard to imagine that this team won’t play better when Ricky Rubio is on the floor in lieu of either Sexton or Garland. It is hard to imagine that Sexton and Garland will still be together if and when this team ends up being good. It doesn’t really matter how much they improve. It just can’t work.
And that, ultimately, is what makes me wonder if it could work. It is what makes me hope it works. There is nothing more exciting in a random NBA season than a team that is not taken seriously somehow upending expectations and doing something cool. What I’m rooting for in life is for the things I deem hopeless to surprise me in their capacity to not be that. Dame and CJ seem, for the moment, to be doomed, but SexLand has one more year to try to put something together worth keeping around. Go Cavs.