Darius Garland’s breakout season, and how it impacts the Cavs’ future

Ready to be a lead guard

Passing acumen is obviously a prerequisite for any lead guard, and that’s the part of Garland’s game that excites me the most. The vision and creativity he possesses are top tier and he shows it in a lot of different ways.

Pick and roll, pocket passes, lobs, transition, live dribble feeds – Garland has just about every pass in the book:

Passes like the ones in the video above don’t come without a cost, especially for a player as young as Garland. His turnover rate clocks in at 14.1% for the season which is pretty high (right around the Westbrook range for context), but his processing is usually on point. A lot of his turnovers come from testing the boundaries of what he can and can’t get away with and is something I think he’ll be able to control more and more as he continues to get more reps.

Limiting those turnovers is part of being a consistent lead guard, and so is being able to command defensive attention as a scorer – something Garland is already good at.

Garland has been hunting threes at a huge rate so far this season, hoisting a three on 45 percent of his shot attempts, and he’s hitting his fair share of them. He’s at 39% for the season, but in December alone he’s hitting over 56 percent of his three-point shots.

That number isn’t sustainable, but for him to be shooting as well as he is this season is pretty impressive, especially when you consider that the shots he’s taking frequently have a pretty high level of difficulty: