Darius Garland Silently Had Better Stats In 2022-23 Than His All-Star Season
The Cleveland Cavaliers have made giant steps forward over the last three seasons returning to relevancy in the NBA. Part of this was having two of their players participate in the 2022 All-Star, which also happened to take place in Cleveland.
Darius Garland and Jarrett Allen took the floor in front of their home crowd and gave the rest of the NBA world a glimpse at what they could see from the Cavs moving forward.
It was a great moment for the city and the organization!
However, a lot of fans thought that Garland's production and stats would drop coming into 2022-23. This wasn't necessarily a critique of his play, but the addition of Donovan Mitchell meant that Garland's usage would most likely drop, which it did.
His USG% this season was 26.2 compared to last season when it was 27.2.
But at the end of this season, Garland's stats look just as good, arguably even better than what they were last season when DG was an All-Star.
He scored 21.6 points per game which were virtually the same as last year when he averaged 21.7 points a night. DG also saw his three-point percentage jump from 38 percent to 41 percent which is a huge boost! Garland became a lot more secure with the ball as he went from averaging 3.6 turnovers a game in his All-Star season to just 2.9 this season.
One area where DG's stats did drop was in the assist department. He averaged 8.6 last season down to 7.8. That still ranks in the top 10 in the NBA and the drop can probably be credited to having another player such as Mitchell helping to run the offense.
All of this is important for Cleveland's future. Naturally, there were going to be questions about whether Garland and Mitchell were able to co-exist in the same backcourt.
At this point, all of that has been squashed!
Mitchell had a career year, just like Garland, and now this team has home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. They're only going to get better playing with one another which is a scary thought for the rest of the NBA.
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