Cavaliers slide by Spurs 114-109

 Darius Garland scored 32 points and Jarrett Allen added 17 points and 16 rebounds to lift the Cleveland Cavaliers to a 114-109 triumph over the San Antonio Spurs in San Antonio.

Evan Mobley finished with fifteen points as the top scorer of the remainder of the lineup as Cleveland improved to 25-18 on the season.

The Cavaliers travel to Oklahoma City Saturday night to finish their road trip against the Thunder and will return home to host Brooklyn Monday afternoon for a Martin Luther King Day matinee'.

Swashbucklings

1) Darius Garland's 32 points were not the only superlative in this game for the Vanderbilt point guard.

Garland never left the floor in the fourth quarter and it was Garland knocking down four free throws to clinch the contest.

Garland has grown a lot in the season and a half since being graded as the league's lowest full-time player by something analytic ratings of players.

2) The Cavaliers' defense deserves some credit as well as they held the Spurs without a point in the fourth quarter from the 6:04 mark until a free throw from Lonnie Walker with 59 seconds remaining.

3) Underrated play of the night: Lauri Markkanen's drive from the lane for an authoritative slam to move the Cavaliers lead to three points with a little over two minutes to go.

The Spurs were in the middle of the noted above scoring drought but the Cavaliers were in one as well.

Markkanen's putting the ball on the floor for the resulting slam woke the Cavalier offense up as they began to move towards the basket, adding a Jarrett Allen dunk on the next possession and drawing a foul on a Darius Garland drive on the following possession.

4) Isaac Okoro returned to the lineup from an elbow sprain.

J.B. Bickerstaff didn't start Okoro, who scored six points in sixteen minutes of floor time.

5)  The game really shouldn't have been that close as the Cavaliers missed ten free throws on the night (they made fourteen), the Spurs aren't a very good team so the door was open to win a game on a night like this- that is unlikely to happen against good teams.

6) I watched the game on the Spurs feed, so I could listen to Bill Land call the game on their network.

Can it really be going on thirty years ago watching VHS tapes sent to me with the now-extinct Southwest Conference games with Land at the microphone?

7) The Spurs wore their alternate uniforms and their court and I'm not a fan as it's based on their 90s versions with lots of blues and bright colors of the era.

The Spurs uniforms are classic in their simplicity and the 90s versions added unneeded colors to the palette.