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Cavs reportedly have ‘little interest’ in trading with Orlando

Mike Watters-Imagn Images

Sending Darius Garland to Orlando doesn’t seem like something the front office wants to do.

This will be an offseason full of rumors and speculation. That happens when a 64-win team like the Cleveland Cavaliers gets bounced in the second round by an opponent they were expected to handle.

Trading Darius Garland to the Orlando Magic for Jalen Suggs has been a popular idea in some circles. The logic would be that even though the Cavs would be acquiring a far worse player in the deal, they would at least save money on the backend of Suggs’s current contract while bolstering their interior defense.

I’ve already gone into why this would be a horrible move for the Cavs. The current reporting suggests that Cleveland’s front office isn’t keen on a deal with Orlando.

According to Jake Fisher, the Cavs have not had substantive trade conversations with the Magic. Fisher writes:

For all the noise these days around Darius Garland in Cleveland, we’ve been reliably told that the Cavaliers and Magic have not held substantive conversations on a Garland deal ... and that Cleveland has little interest in helping Orlando improve its standing in the Eastern Conference.

This doesn’t mean that the Cavs are completely against moving Garland in any type of deal. ESPN’s Brian Windhorst has stated that they could be open to moving Garland “under the right circumstances.” For now, sending him to a potential playoff opponent doesn’t seem to be the right circumstance.

Things can change quickly in the NBA. Just because something is off the table now doesn’t mean that it will be next month or in a few weeks. Additionally, Koby Altman’s front office typically doesn’t telegraph its moves. Their big trades — like the Kyrie Irving and Donovan Mitchell deals — were both somewhat unexpected before they went down. It stands to reason that any move involving a current member of their core would be carried out the same way.

The second apron will also make any deal more difficult this offseason. They aren’t allowed to take more money back than they send out, and they can’t aggregate contracts. That means that they aren’t able to send out two players and get back one like they did with the De’Andre Hunter trade back in February.

This will be a busy offseason for Altman. He will have to make difficult decisions about whether this core is built to compete in the playoffs after they’ve been bounced by a team with a worse regular season record in two of the three years they’ve been together.

Source: https://www.fearthesword.com/2025/6...-orland-magic-jalen-suggs-cleveland-cavaliers