Caris LeVert at Cavs media day. ESPN Cleveland/Rob Lorenzo.
Who is going to be the starting small forward for the Cavs?
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The Cavaliers went into this season with four of their five starters set in stone once the team acquired Donovan Mitchell from the Utah Jazz in a blockbuster trade. He will undoubtedly be joined by fellow All-Stars Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen at point guard and center, respectively. Second-year big man Evan Mobley will be the team’s starter at power forward and may have the highest ceiling of that bunch.
The question that remains is who do the Cavaliers start at small forward?
The team has a number of different options and head coach J.B. Bickerstaff rattled off the full list of names earlier during training camp. Cedi Osman, Dylan Windler, Dean Wade, Caris LeVert, Lamar Stevens, and Isaac Okoro were all the options that Bickerstaff named. Obviously, only one of those guys can start and it’s unlikely that they’re all able to be in the rotation logging significant minutes.
In the team’s first two preseason games, losses against Philadelphia, LeVert started. In the third, he was given the night off. He obviously wasn’t the only player in competition to earn a start during the preseason. Wade earned a start at the power forward in the second game against Philadelphia before leaving with an ankle injury. In the team’s third preseason game, Okoro and Stevens were both on the floor to start. During the fourth game, the Cavaliers trotted out a bit of an unconventional lineup, thanks to Mitchell, Garland, and Allen not making the trip to Orlando.
With the preseason having come and gone, it’s relatively safe to rule out Windler, Osman, and Stevens as potential starters at the small forward. Windler didn’t play due to an ankle injury anyways and Osman and Stevens were relative long shots to earn the job from the outset.
That leaves LeVert, Wade, and Okoro as the three viable options for the position. Here’s the case for each of them.
Isaac Okoro
Okoro seemed like a long shot for this until he was placed in the starting lineup in the preseason game against Atlanta and thrived. Okoro finished that game with 16 points on 7-of-9 shooting (2-of-4 from three). He dabbled in a little bit of everything, finishing with a pair of rebounds, three assists, and three steals before fouling out in 33 minutes.
It wasn’t the stats alone that stood out when watching Okoro, it was how confident he looked on the offensive end of the floor that was the most encouraging part. In the past, Okoro has hesitated to shoot open 3-pointers. Depending on who he shares the floor with, Okoro is going to continue to have wide open looks at the rim from behind the arc. Last season, 34.3 percent of Okoro’s attempts from the floor were “wide open” 3-pointers according to NBA.com. Okoro made 35.1 percent of these shots, a number that needs to be higher for defenses to regret leaving him that open.
Okoro doesn’t need to be a star offensively, especially considering how strong of a defender he is, to make things work with the rest of the starters. He just needs to be enough of a threat that he’s able to force teams to guard him. If that happens, then Okoro is the perfect fit alongside the other four.
Cedi Osman
Osman deserves a mention in this article because he’s likely earned minutes in the rotation with his performance during the preseason. He’s not going to start, and there’s not much else to say about him here, but it would be a surprise if he weren’t on the floor for somewhere between seven and 10 minutes per game as the season begins.
Dean Wade
After missing a significant amount of the preseason after injuring his ankle against Philadelphia in the team’s second preseason, Wade became an afterthought of sorts. Early on, he was seen as a logical starter next to Mitchell, Allen, Mobley, and Garland, in part because his size and penchant for shooting the 3-pointer allows the Cavaliers to not have to change too much from their big-ball mentality last year.
No, Wade isn’t a 7-footer like Lauri Markkanen, but he is listed at 6-foot-9 and could allow for a more seamless transition from the style of play by the starting lineup last year to this year’s version. It had to be something the Cavaliers thought about early on, but after what both LeVert and Okoro did this preseason, in addition to Wade’s injury, that ship has most likely sailed.
Caris LeVert
Of the guys in consideration for this spot, LeVert is the guy that was most raved about by members of the Cavs during this training camp. It had been repeatedly mentioned that LeVert was one of the more impressive players the Cavs had on the court, and that the organization was expecting him to be a different player than the guy they had following his arrival from the Pacers at midseason last year.
LeVert is the player on this list that is the most talented of the bunch. If the goal for the Cavaliers is simply to put forth the most talent in a single lineup, LeVert is the answer.
While that may ultimately be the solution that Bickerstaff chooses to go with, the process of getting there isn’t quite that simple because the fit has to matter to some extent, too. LeVert does possess a different skillset than Okoro, but he also does need the ball in his hands a little bit more in order to be as effective as possible on the offensive end. With both Garland and Mitchell already running the show offensively, that could complicate things at the beginning at least. LeVert not being a great 3-point shooter also could create some spacing concerns. For his career, LeVert is a 33.3 percent shooter from deep and has never shot higher than 36.4 percent from beyond the arc, which happened during his final full season in Brooklyn.
What could be interesting, especially while the Cavs are without backup point guard Ricky Rubio, who is recovering from a torn ACL suffered last December, is bringing LeVert of the bench and pairing him with Mitchell with the rest of the second unit.
With that said, LeVert is the most likely option to start at small forward. It could mean nothing, but along with Mitchell, Garland, and Mobley, LeVert was wearing a wine-colored practice jersey on Tuesday before the team departed for Toronto, while Okoro wasn’t.
When Bickerstaff was asked following practice who the fifth starter could be, he chose not to reveal his cards before required.
“Nice try,” he said.
