CLEVELAND, Ohio - The spotlight in professional sports is unforgiving, particularly in the crucible of the NBA playoffs. For Darius Garland, the Cavs’ All-Star point guard, that spotlight revealed troubling cracks during Cleveland’s five-game elimination by the Indiana Pacers.
The numbers paint a stark picture, as Terry Pluto detailed on this week’s edition of the Terry’s Talkin’ podcast:
“Garland stats: He shot 34% from the field. He shot 17% on threes. It was bad,” Pluto said. “... He looked overwhelmed. And he’s looked overwhelmed, you know, a fair amount of time in his career in the playoffs.”
This playoff disappearing act isn’t an isolated incident. Throughout his career, Garland has struggled to elevate his game when the stakes are highest, raising legitimate questions about whether he can be the second star on a championship-caliber team.
Garland’s mid-series comments about his nagging toe injury also raised some concerns.
“In the middle of this series, Darius Garland was telling reporters about, ‘People don’t know what I’m going through and how painful it is,’ ” podcast host David Campbell said. “And when I saw that, I’m like, ‘This could be some trouble for the Cavs. He’s already making excuses for why he’s not playing well.’ ”
While Donovan Mitchell battled through a troublesome ankle issue with little comment, Garland’s public discussion of his injury raised eyebrows about his mental toughness and the future playoff potential Mitchell-Garland backcourt pairing.
The limitations of the undersized duo were exposed by Indiana’s pressure defense, Pluto said.
“The backcourt, I think, was exposed by Indiana because they had trouble getting the ball up the court,” Pluto said.
As Cleveland moves forward, difficult conversations await. Pluto even floated a potential solution that would have been unthinkable just months ago: bringing Garland off the bench.
“I think they have to do that,” Pluto suggested.
Here’s the podcast for this week:
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Note: Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from Terry’s Talkin’, a weekly cleveland.com sports podcast. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions.