Cleveland Cavaliers: 2019-20 NBA season preview
By Phil Watson
Best-case scenario
The best-case scenario for the Cleveland Cavaliers isn’t championship contention or even a playoff berth. Rather, it’s about health and development of the young players.
If all goes well for the Cavaliers, John Beilein will have a seamless transition to the NBA as a head coach and will help steer the team’s young assets — Collin Sexton, Cedi Osman, Darius Garland, Dylan Windler, Kevin Porter Jr., and Ante Zizic — to seasons in which they are much better players in April than they were in October.
Porter, in particular, will prove the critics wrong and show he learned to mature his game and demeanor after he was a lottery talent that fell in the draft. By the end of the season, he and Jordan Clarkson are teaming up to make life miserable for the second units of the opposition.
The veterans will step up and lead the kids and while they may not make a serious push for the playoffs, neither will the Cavaliers simply be pushed over by everyone in the NBA.
They’ll make teams earn their wins and will jump up and bite some playoff-caliber clubs along the way before ending up in the lottery with 32-35 victories, with Garland making a Rookie of the Year push, while Sexton and Osman clean up some of the deficiencies that made them anathema to the analytics community last season.
Worst-case scenario
Beilein gets frustrated after losing more game by the New Year than he did in the last three seasons combined (27) and decides he’s had enough, leaving the Cavaliers with their fifth coach since 2015 when J.B. Bickerstaff is made the interim guy.
Sexton doesn’t make the jump many were hoping for and remains a wildly inefficient wild card at the offensive end who does little to facilitate for his teammates and Garland, with a similar skill set, follows suit as it becomes a game of “I’m gonna get mine.”
The frustrated veterans begin looking for a way out of Cleveland, with Love and then Tristan Thompson asking to be dealt.
Porter continues to be the wrong sort of X-factor, freelancing too often and resisting the efforts of the coaching staff to rein him in and the season disintegrates into another 60-loss nightmare.