One month has passed since the Cleveland Cavaliers inked a contract with former Milwaukee Bucks big man Larry Sanders but, before he could contribute anything of real value on the floor, the team parted ways with the 28-year-old center earlier this week. On the surface, it appeared that the Cavaliers simply might have decided that former Atlanta Hawks and Toronto Raptors center Edy Tavares (who the team signed) was the better investment, but Jason Lloyd of The Athletic sheds different light on the situation.
The report indicates that Sanders “missed the team bus from the hotel to the airport Tuesday in Miami” and that this misstep was the “final blow” when it came to his tenure with the reigning NBA champions. Beyond that, Lloyd spoke with Cavs GM David Griffin and he provided interesting insight into what Sanders was like behind the scenes after arriving in Cleveland.
“He didn’t have any kind of a setback relative to any of the demons he had or any of those things. He’s an NBA player. He’s kind of flaky. So sometimes you’re late. You’re this. You’re that. None of those things were incidents. But I have to take you in totality as a player and if I know you’re not going to play, then what I’m going to get is everything else. And if I didn’t even feel confident that he’d be a benefit to the group in practice, then it was hard for me to tell coaches, ‘This is a guy you’ve got to keep.’ So they had the conversation on the plane, what else can we do? And we talked about it and we landed and we talked to all the rest of our staff and made a decision.”
“I didn’t think it was going to take him so long to be contributing at least at practice. He was much further away than we thought. And by his own admission. He would tell you he was. He knew he was. I think that was a big part of it.”
Griffin’s reference to “demons he had” seems to be with regard to off-court issues with marijuana and/or diagnosed depression that Sanders encountered while employed under a massive four-year contract with the Milwaukee Bucks. In this case, though, it appears that Sanders simply was not ready to make any sort of tangible on-court impact for a high-level team. That, coupled with being “flaky” in the words of Griffin, is a bad recipe for a team with singular aspirations toward a repeat title.
Larry Sanders is still an intriguing basketball player if engaged and solely focused on the sport. Whether he actually reaches the point of contributing in the NBA again, though, remains to be seen.
