Final Score: Cleveland Cavaliers take care of Utah Jazz 129-113

The Nightly Notables

The Cavaliers came out early and the offense was thriving against a Utah defense that never felt like it settled. The Cavs opened the first quarter scoring 40 points on a hyper-efficient 67% from the field.

However, like all Cavaliers games as of late, it appeared the juice in the offense was drained after the first quarter as the team sputtered throughout much of the second quarter. It took roughly five minutes left in the second after putting up a dire 3-10 showing till that point for the team to get their act together pouring on a quick 17-2 run to close out the quarter.

From the third quarter onward, the Cavaliers never let the Jazz outside their rearview for the remainder of the game. Closing out the game the way a team vying for the two seed in the East should play against a team hoping the ping pong balls fall their way. However, as this regular season comes to an end one has to wonder while wins are a valuable currency in the NBA, what are the Cavaliers learning from these wins, and are they building blocks for playoff success?

Will the real Darius Garland stand up?

Everyone else seems to be having no trouble (Allen with 21, LeVert with 26, and Mobley with 21 in Mitchell’s Absence with his lingering knee problem. Tonight was another example of how the Cavaliers can win a game convincingly without one of the founding pillars of the franchise playing to his normal level.

For some teams, this would be viewed as a testament to their depth and their overall talent, this has been too often an occurrence and one could make the argument that some of Garland’s best-scoring games come in affairs where the game is out of hand by the time he gets it going.

Garland statistically is playing solid basketball, however, it is the eyeball test that has shown Garland fades out of games more often than not recovering his scoring woes by stacking up the points in glorified garbage time.

Tonight, at the beginning of the fourth quarter, with the Cavaliers leading by 16, Garland had five points on four shots. One would hope that in games where the Cavaliers are cruising Garlands’ fingerprints would be all over a win such as this, however, it feels almost as if the offense can succeed despite him fading through quarters sometimes during games.

While it is beyond fair to point out that injuries have made Garland’s 2023-24 campaign feel like a lost season with all he has had to withstand, Garland for this team to have any chance in the postseason needs him to have his hands all over the offense, especially in the absence of an All-NBA player like Donovan Mitchell. Games like tonight in May will spell catastrophic results.

The Big Picture

While the win against Utah is valuable while lobbying for playoff seeding, the Cavaliers are in a strange spot with the whole Donovan Mitchell situation. Without Mitchell near his best, the Cavaliers could win the last handful of games or lose them and the result for this team in the postseason will be dreary and oddly familiar to those who tuned into last year’s New York Knicks series.

In the case that the Cavaliers enter the postseason without Donovan Mitchell playing like how we know he is capable of, Cavalier fans should enjoy these wins as they might be some of the last we will see until October.