Sexton's out, now what?

 Colin Sexton is out indefinitely.  Get well Collin.

I started running through lineup options with Sexton out after the news came out but there were to many options with none of them particularly good and to many variables (is Okoro back, when will Love/LM return, will anyone else get injured, is Ricky Rubio going to start scoring 30 a game every night).  

While rolling this stuff around in my head I started to get a feeling.  Now this isn’t a thought, this isn’t based on lineup data, or stats but is just a feeling.  I will say this up front, part of this feeling is just the good vibes of watching a team play surprisingly well night after night*.  

That feeling?  Darius Garland is about to make his star turn.  

The net value of Garland so far this season is not much better than last year’s production.  He’s added 1.5 assists a game but dropped 2 points and added a TO, and he’s down in production a fair amount from how he was finishing last season before he got hurt (20.5/7/3 on 59% TS his last 15 full games), but he feels like a better player to me.  What do I think (hope?) is driving this perception?

1.  Passing.  Quantitatively different.  Last season Darius had 6 games of 10+ assists in 54 total games.  That is a nice and neat 1 every 9 games, lo and behold he has played 9 games this year with three 10+ assist results already.  The distribution is not just top end either, last year he had 10 games with fewer than 4 assists, or 1 every 5.4 games, this season none.  

2. 3 pt shooting.  After starting the season 11/36 he has drilled 11/14 in three games.  Certainly that feeling of recency bias is there.  He is definitely shooting more 3pta per game, 0.7 more per game, 0.9 more per 100, despite taking fewer over all FGAs (down 4.8 per 100).  

3. Self creation.  You might think that with an actual, honest to goodness, for real, passing point next to him at least some times would lead to more assisted shots, but not for Darius.  So far he has been assisted on 41% of his made 3s, well down from his career average of 69% and he is taking less than half as many from the corners (by rate).  

The big shift going forward without Sexton is obviously going to be in Garland’s usage rate which has dropped 2.2 points from last season and is 5.3 points down from his final month last season when he was given the proverbial keys to the offense.  The Cavs have been running a pretty flat distribution of usage with their 3 guards available, but in the two games that Darius sat Sexton had 29% and 33% usage marks.  I expect Darius to jump above 25% while maintaining a high assist rate to match.

Finally, you can’t avoid it, the Cavs offense has just been consistently better with Garland on the court and Sexton off.  It wasn’t a huge amount better last year, only 2.1 pp100 over their average production and 1.1 better than SexLand together, and the huge outperformance this year (23.5 better) is on a small sample but there are reasons to believe this to be true in general even if we don’t have a grasp on the magnitude**.  Garland is straight up a more natural fit with off ball scorers than Collin, and his defensive limitations trim the top off Collin’s transition value.  

So that is my hope, it’s not something that I can put odds on or claim has as strong a foundation as I would like but I think that over the next 20-30 games (especially of Love/LM return and shoot like they can) Garland’s offensive numbers are going to get him into All-Star consideration and maybe even simply All-Star expectation.

*Can you tell I missed most of the Phoenix game?

** I am not wading into the Garland/Sexton debate here because afaict the only sensible position is ‘we have these guys, see how they play/develop/grow and make your decisions in the future with better information’.