The Cleveland Cavaliers are a mess. They’ve got two wins in their last nine, and both came against the Orlando Magic by a combined five points.
The bad news goes beyond just the losing. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that players called out Kevin Love at a contentious players-only meeting on Sunday, and during their loss to the San Antonio Spurs Tuesday night, cameras caught J.R. Smith and Jae Crowder refusing to help Love up after he got hit in the head.
This team isn’t right, and something needs to be done. After saying he wouldn’t do it on Sunday, Tyronn Lue has now committed to a lineup change for their next game Friday night. Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas also said on the TNT broadcast Tuesday that it might be time for a big trade to shake things up. But what kind of trade?
Coincidentally, there’s a lot of speculation going around about whether the team is willing to flip the 2018 Brooklyn Nets’ first-round pick they got from Boston in the Kyrie Irving deal. Is George Hill worth it? DeAndre Jordan? Lou Williams?
Let’s say they do that last deal. They trade the Nets’ pick — which is likely to fall in the top 10, and, who knows, could end up being top three thanks to the NBA’s lottery system — and about $7-million worth of extraneous players for Williams. He’s having a great season and has proven through his long career that he doesn’t need any hand holding, but he doesn’t change any of the major issues facing the team: the back-biting, the toxic chemistry, or the lack of effort and defence.
Jordan, meanwhile, would help clean the offensive glass, but is seventh on his own team in fourth-quarter minutes per game thanks in part to shaky free-throw shooting. Hill is a fine complementary piece, but no game changer.
So why pull the trigger on any of them?
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There’s still a sense that, based on LeBron’s greatness alone, the Cavs could flip a switch in the playoffs and make the Eastern Conference Final or possibly the NBA Finals itself. The lack of sure-fire Eastern contenders (sorry, Boston and Toronto) helps that assumption along nicely, too. But here’s the thing: The Cavs aren’t winning the title this year.
Unless something catastrophic happens, Golden State is winning it again. And even if something catastrophic happens to the Warriors, the title is still far more likely to land in Houston or San Antonio than it is in Cleveland.
So why give away a huge asset like the Nets’ pick just to get to the same place you probably would’ve gotten anyway?
There’s no reason to. The Cavs don’t need to add. If anything, they need to subtract as much as they possibly can.
It seems like Isiah Thomas and others are thinking of this team as a modern version of the 2007–08 Lakers, who got Pau Gasol at the deadline and won a title a few months later.
But they actually need to act like the 2013–14 Raptors, who sold off Rudy Gay for spare, hungry parts en route to a crazy second half.
It’s not that the Cavs’ players are ubiquitously bad. It’s just that there’s too much stylistic and positional redundancy, and — this isn’t a little point — they seem to hate each other. So call teams in need of shooting about J.R. Smith, Kyle Korver and Channing Frye. See if anyone believes in Tristan Thompson or potential second-half bouncebacks for any of your weird glut of combo guards.
And, yes, shop Kevin Love and the final two and a half years of his contract to star-starved markets, and take the best offer you get.
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The team isn’t working beyond LeBron. Keep him and let literally everything else go as long as it doesn’t bring back bad contracts.
Obviously, that’s a whole lot easier said than done. Other than Love, there aren’t a whole lot of players on the Cavs to sell high on. But the team should at least make an effort because there’s yet another elephant in the room: LeBron has an opt-out of his current contract at the end of the season, and there’s no guarantee he’ll stay.
While he said in September he still plans on staying in Cleveland long-term, he said in October that he doesn’t owe anybody anything.
Sure, the Cavaliers could try to pick from the best available players on the market to show LeBron they’re serious about winning like they did in 2010 by adding Antawn Jamison from the Washington Wizards in exchange for a first-round pick and spare parts. But how did that work out for them? They lost in the Eastern Conference semis to — yup — the Boston Celtics, LeBron took his talents to South Beach, and the 2010–11 Cavs went 19-63.
On the other hand, selling off pieces will likely hurt, especially in the short term as LeBron figures out the new pieces around him, but it accomplishes two things: 1) It inevitably changes the tenor of the locker room, and 2) It better prepares the team for the Armageddon of a potential LeBron-less future.
If LeBron leaves in the off-season, well, that’ll suck. But, hey, if the Cavs are smart at the coming deadline and hold on to their Nets pick, at least they’ll have a lottery talent to build around and a clean(er) cap sheet.
The plan makes sense even if he decides to stay: They’ll have that lottery talent to pair with him for the twilight of his career and provide a succession plan for years down the road.
It’s not the standard script, but it makes more sense than throwing good money — and picks — at a band-aid solution.
