The Larry Sanders experiment is over in Cleveland. According to Jason Lloyd of The Athletic, Sanders, 28, missed the team bus that took the Cavaliers to the airport in Miami on Tuesday. Ultimately, Sanders would miss the team flight to Cleveland. He would have to find his own way back to Cleveland.
Here is what Cavs’ GM David Griffin had to say about Sanders:
“He didn’t have any kind of a setback relative to any of the demons he had or any of those things,” Cavs general manager David Griffin said. “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.”
This could impact his future in the NBA moving forward. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for Sanders, but maybe he was not ready to handle a “NBA lifestyle” again.
