Luke Travers: Does his game translate to the NBA?

The Cavs will figure out what they have in Travers this season.

The Cleveland Cavaliers know what the best version of Luke Travers looks like. It’s the same player he showed he could be with Melbourne in Australia’s NBL. Travers was a solid defender and secondary playmaker while bouncing between small and power forward. Whether or not he can adapt his game over to the NBA is an open question.

The Cavs’ organization believes that he can.

“I think if you put him out on the floor with NBA players, he fits in perfectly,” Cleveland Charge head coach Chris Darnell said. “He does have really good feel and he’s an extremely intelligent basketball player that knows how to read coverages, understands what the defense is doing, and is playing that chess match while he’s out there on the floor.”

How Travers has continued to improve in the NBL is what has stood out.

“He’s coming off a great season,” Charge general manager Liron Fanan said. “We’ve seen him make these jumps. Now he can be with the Cavs a lot, but get reps with us and see where he could get to.”

Travers will need to show that he can round out his offensive game for him to be an effective rotation player. He only connected on 32.9% of his 1.9 threes per game in five seasons in Australia. This included shooting just 32.7% on 2.1 attempts last season with Melbourne.

“In the NBA you need to shoot,” Fanan said. “I want to see him consistently shoot the ball.”

Travers won’t be able to get into or stay in the rotation if his shooting doesn’t improve. Especially since he isn’t more than a secondary ball handler and doesn’t create his own offense. Even someone like Isaac Okoro, who shot 39.1% from distance last season, struggles to be productive offensively because he can’t create his own shot or facilitate for others. That issue is magnified for someone like Travers who isn’t as dynamic with the ball as Okoro is.

There is also a question about whether his defense is good enough to outweigh some of the offensive concerns. Travers has shown to be a solid positional defender in the NBL which carried over to Summer League, but he would need to be more than that to consistently find his way onto the court.

Ultimately, there are still a lot of unknowns with Travers. His Summer League performances have been inconsistent, but it’s difficult to take too much away from those showings. That’s why it was so important for the Cavs to bring him over on a two-way deal. They need to see what they have in their 2022 second-round pick.

“We want to see him consistently playing against the highest level,” Fanan said. “We want to see how he can compete with our guys in camp. We want to see the stuff he can do. We believe it’s there, but [he needs to] go through that process.”