Cleveland Cavaliers forward Marcus Morris claimed that if he had been in big man Jarrett Allen’s position from an injury standpoint in the 2024 NBA Playoffs, he would have been on the court playing.
.@MookMorris2 on Jarrett Allen missing playoff games due to injury.
"If you put me in that same position, do I play? Yes." pic.twitter.com/rmTsVZFKOe
— Run It Back (@RunItBackFDTV) May 24, 2024
It’s worth noting that Cavs executive Koby Altman told reporters that it would’ve been “impossible” for Allen to play through his injury.
“I’ve had several people reach out to me about how much it hurts,” Altman said. “You can’t drive to work, you can’t sleep, you can’t tie your sneakers. To give you some insight to what Jarrett did, I mean, Jarrett tried to give it a go: I mean, to the last day and a half [of the season], he was trying to go up and down on this floor and do some real basketball moves. It’s hard to play basketball if you can’t raise your arms over your head. I know there was speculation of more stuff he could’ve done — it’s impossible to play through what he was going through.”
Allen missed the Cavaliers’ final eight playoff games — as well as the entirety of their second-round series against the Boston Celtics — with a rib injury. A report surfaced during the playoffs indicating that he was in a great deal of pain and having difficulty lifting his arm.
The injury was recently described as a broken rib.
Allen played in Games 1, 2, 3 and 4 of Cleveland’s first-round matchup against the Orlando Magic, and during that span, he was one of the team’s most productive players.
The 26-year-old averaged 17.0 points, 13.8 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 1.0 block and 1.3 steals per game while shooting 67.6 percent from the floor and 69.2 percent from the charity stripe versus Orlando.
Arguably his best game of the series came in Game 4, when he dropped 21 points and nine rebounds on 8-of-11 shooting from the field. But the Cavaliers still lost that game by more than 20 points despite his contributions as a rebounder and interior scorer.
Fortunately, even with Allen out of the lineup after Game 4, the Cavaliers managed to eliminate the Magic in seven games, and the home team won every game in the series.
After getting past the Magic, however, the Cavaliers (without Allen) met their match in the Celtics, who are currently one of the four teams still alive in the 2024 NBA Playoffs. The Cavaliers were eliminated in five games in the second round and had trouble scoring the ball at times throughout the series, considering Cleveland scored fewer than 100 points in three of the five games.
Perhaps Allen’s ability to score the ball in the paint would have helped the Cavaliers extend their second-round series, especially considering Celtics big man Kristaps Porzingis sat out for the whole series due to a calf injury he suffered in Boston’s first-round series against the Miami Heat.
Regardless of Morris’ comments, considering the pain that Allen was supposedly in due to his rib injury, it’s clear why he didn’t make a return to the lineup for the Cavaliers during the 2024 NBA Playoffs.
