17 Dec 17
#0
Larry Sanders
Position: None
Born: 11/21/88
Height: 6-11 / 2.11
Weight:235 lbs. / 106.6 kg.
Salary: $5,000,000
Born: 11/21/88
Height: 6-11 / 2.11
Weight:235 lbs. / 106.6 kg.
Salary: $5,000,000
When Cavaliers center Tristan Thompson suffered a sprained thumb late in the season, missing four games, Sanders got only two minutes of non-garbage time action in that span. Part of it was because he wasn’t in the requisite shape, and part of it was that with the Cavs in a fight for the No. 1 seed, Sanders wasn’t about to suddenly leapfrog more trusted players in coach Tyronn Lue’s rotation. “He was having a hard time from a conditioning standpoint,” Griffin said. “But it was really the fact that they didn’t want to play him more. So it’s more the fact of Tristan is out, you’re not going to play Kevin [Love] all that much, how are we not playing him? Why won’t you play this guy? When we got to the point where it became clear that even in the situation where we had no other bigs, he wasn’t going to play, then what are we doing here?
“Larry, every day is a struggle for Larry. Larry is not one of those guys that’s bulletproof. And so if I know he’s not going to play, I’m going to take the guy that I have the most faith in, in totality, than somebody that may or may not play. So that’s kind of what I did.”
Is this it for Sanders’ comeback attempt? The Cavs aren’t closing the door completely. “We’re not signing off from the Larry Experience,” Griffin said. “We like Larry, so yeah, absolutely if it worked out and he was in game shape we would certainly entertain that.”
“I think it was pretty clear Larry was really far away in ways that we didn’t think that he was really far away,” Cavs general manager David Griffin said Wednesday before Cleveland played its regular season finale against the Toronto Raptors.
“He didn’t have an ‘incident,’” Griffin said. “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.”
Now Sanders is gone again after he struggled keeping up with responsibilities on and off the court. He missed the team bus from the hotel to the airport Tuesday in Miami, multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told The Athletic, the final blow to his time here after Sanders had previously struggled with punctuality.
