MIAMI — The top-seeded Cavs will be shorthanded once again Monday night, as they look for a series sweep against the Miami Heat.
All-Star point guard Darius Garland, listed as questionable, is out for a second straight game because of a sprained big toe on his left foot.
“He did very little yesterday,” Cavs coach Kenny Atkinson said of Garland, referencing the team’s optional practice at the University of Miami. “You never know how these things go. I don’t think it’s an eight-week thing. I think it’s manage his pain. The toe is a tough one. You’re just constantly hitting it.”
Garland has been plagued by the injury since the end of the regular season. He then re-aggravated it in the final minutes of Wednesday’s Game 2 win in Cleveland. Despite gutting through it at the end, Garland did not play Game 3 — a 124-87 Cleveland victory that put it ahead 3-0 in the series.
Teams up 3-0 in any playoff series are 158-0 all-time.
“This is more about Darius and the medical team kind of figuring it out,” Atkinson explained. “You want to have him out there. I feel like when you don’t have an All-Star, we kind of dodged a bullet, we got through the last game and did a good job, but we don’t want to keep going without him. I don’t think there was any like, ‘Hey, we’re up, don’t worry about it.’ There was none of that talk. I was like, ‘We need you, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.’”
In two playoff games against Miami, Garland is averaging 24.0 points and 7.0 assists.
