The Cleveland Cavaliers are off to a bumpy start to the season, which has brought forth attention to many new additions to the team over the offseason.
One of which was All-Star guard Dwyane Wade, who has struggled to find his footing in his first campaign in Cleveland. A major part of his offensive woes had been in the starting lineup to begin the season but he has since been moved to the bench.
However, it appears that the arrival of Wade wasn’t necessarily anticipated at any point this past offseason as Brian Windhorst of ESPN revealed during a recent interview on The Lowe Post.
“Dwyane Wade signed, and – not [because of] anything Dwyane did but – that arrival threw five or six people out of whack, including Ty Lue. I’m not saying he would admit to this publicly, but he didn’t wanna start Dwyane… He [just] knew that he had to because it was the right thing for the chemistry of the team. He ended up starting five different lineups the first seven games. And it displaced JR Smith – who pouted – and he’s playing terribly.”
The addition of Wade apparently forced Lue’s hand to put the 35-year-old in the starting lineup in order to better help the team chemistry given that he has plenty of experience playing alongside LeBron James. However, it is evident that the plan had always been to roll with JR Smith in the starting, which is something that has been the case since his arrival in the 2014-15 season.
This has thrown things off with Smith, who has struggled tremendously to find any consistency offensively averaging career lows with 5.4 points on 25.9 percent shooting from the field and 17.1 percent from beyond the arc through the first seven games. He has also scored in double figures twice over that span scoring no more than 11 points and shot less than 30 percent from the field on five occasions.
With Wade now coming off the bench and Derrick Rose back in the fold from his ankle injury, things could begin to shift in the right direction for the Cavaliers’ backcourt.