The Cavaliers' bad news could become an instruction manual

How the losses of Evan Mobley and Darius Garland might reveal what's wrong with Cleveland this season.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Night; Simeon Solomon; 1890

The Cleveland Cavaliers, plodding through an underwhelming season, got hit with a flurry of bad news on Friday: Evan Mobley needs knee surgery and will miss 6-8 weeks while Darius Garland suffered a broken jaw, also requiring surgery and knocking him out for four weeks.

Mobley and Garland are the Cavaliers’ second and third best players in some order. Mobley had already missed four of Cleveland’s 25 games before this news, and Garland had missed five. Reliance on the team’s other key players — star Donovan Mitchell, one-time All-Star Jarrett Allen, Max Strus, Caris LeVert and suddenly Isaac Okoro again — shoots up in the interim.

Cleveland sat at 13-12 when the news hit, and 6-5 in games in which J.B. Bickerstaff had his normal starting lineup in place. Again: underwhelming. There hasn’t been reporting on pressure on Bickerstaff during the season, but before the campaign began it was widely mentioned that this was a year of higher expectations following a strong 2022-23 regular season and disastrous playoff series against the Knicks. So coming into the season, Bickerstaff was one of the coaches to watch for signs of a warming chair.

In this case, these outside forces putting downward pressure on the Cavaliers’ expectations is a benefit (unless you think that Bickerstaff is holding the team back). With Mobley and Garland out for a key stretch of the season, floating around .500 no longer becomes a sign of modest failure. If Cleveland can hang around the No. 6 seed (they are a half-game out after a win over the Hawks on Saturday) it will be a sign of resilience, and perhaps change the mood around the team.

I also have a hunch that any success during this stretch will expose some of the inherent roster flaws of the team. The Cavaliers don’t have a natural fill-in for Mobley — Dean Wade got the call on Saturday, and actually has 11 starts this season, often filling in for whichever of Mobley and Allen are out. (I suspect he might replace Strus too, but Strus has been available for all 26 games to date.) For Garland, Bickerstaff has popped Okoro back in, moving Mitchell to full-time lead guard and adding some defense and a little size to the backcourt.

Garland and Mobley are much, much better than Okoro and Wade. It’s indisputable. But you could argue — and we’ll have a chance to see — that this team can be effective with Mitchell and a defense-first guard plus a normal frontcourt with one center instead of two.