Larry Sanders was given a tremendous opportunity to revive his NBA career when he was signed by the Cleveland Cavaliers last month, and it sounds like he blew it in part because of a lack of maturity.
The Cavs waived Sanders this week after just 28 days with the team, and the move was not surprising given how little he had contributed on the court. But according to a report from Jason Lloyd of The Athletic, Cleveland decided to part ways with Sanders after he missed the team bus from the hotel to the airport in Miami on Tuesday. Sanders ended up having to fly home by himself.
While that may have been the final straw for Sanders, it was apparently not the only issue the 28-year-old had with punctuality.
“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 of releasing Sanders. “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.”
Sanders, a former first-round pick, has had a flurry of issues off the court. Toward the end of his tenure with the Milwaukee Bucks, there were reports that the forward simply didn’t enjoy playing basketball anymore. Given that he was out of basketball for two years before the Cavs gave him a shot, it would not be a surprise if Sanders’ days in the NBA are over.
