as he recently said<\/a> on The Bill Simmons Podcast: <\/p>\n“If I was a Cavs fan, wouldn’t be happy about the Clippers box scores lately… None of what has happened with Darius Garland on the Clippers would make me happy if I was a Cavs fan because you just did the rarely seen, ‘old guy for a guy about to hit his prime,’ who had kinda had a rocky couple years but there were real reasons for it with injuries. And you bailed because you thought you had a chance to win the title, now you’re probably gonna be the fourth seed in the East…”<\/p>\n
Not quite, Bill. Garland was consistently underrated when he played with the Cavaliers, and I’m extremely confident that a majority of Cavs fans are happy to see him thrive with the Clippers. If Garland was balling out while James Harden was singlehandedly ruining the Cavs, maybe it would be a different story.<\/p>\n
But he’s not! Harden has been exactly what the Cavs hoped he’d be; a secondary ballhandler and high-level offensive engine next to Donovan Mitchell. Saying the Cavs “bailed” on Garland makes it sound like they cut him. They didn’t \u2014 they traded him for a star.<\/p>\n
Darius Garland is thriving in Los Angeles and Cavs fans are happy for him<\/p>\n
Darius Garland has always been good. His worst season came when he broke his jaw. If anyone is surprised that he’s been effective in LA (where he’s averaging 21 and 7 on outstanding efficiency) then they weren’t paying attention to the games he did play in Cleveland.<\/p>\n
Maybe things crash and burn with James Harden. But that’s not going to make Cavs fans bitter about Darius Garland doing well in a city 3000 miles away from Cleveland. There’s no bitterness from Cavs fans, even if Bill Simmons wants there to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Cleveland Cavaliers didn’t trade Darius Garland for James Harden because they thought Garland was suddenly a bad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":689798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3789],"tags":[7,559,4034,192,4032,251,135,4033,4031,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-689797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-clippers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-clippers","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-clippers","12":"tag-laclippers","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-clippers","15":"tag-losangeles","16":"tag-losangelesclippers","17":"tag-nba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116323748651627732","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/689798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}