Cleveland Cavaliers: Trouble Brewing For The Defending Champs?

With LeBron James now on a $31 per-year million deal, is trouble brewing for the Cleveland Cavaliers?

Even with the newly expanded salary cap, things are looking tight for the newly crowned NBA Champions. Not only are the Cleveland Cavaliers over the cap, even with the extended room, but they are close to being over the luxury tax as well.

You can truly blame Kevin Love for all this but we aren’t gonna get into that just yet.

This offseason the Cleveland Cavaliers, who narrowly edged out a Game 7 Finals victory over the Golden State Warriors, lost quality backups in Timofey Mozgov and Mathew Dellavedova.

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Regardless of how bad you think their contracts are, or how bad they were, they are still quality assets. When you lose players with two-time NBA finals experience and molding pieces on a Finals winning team, it hurts.

As it stands, the Cavs have no true starting center on their roster. Even if they start Tristan Thompson at the 5, they would have no backup center. They also have no backup point guard, losing the one that played quality minutes for them last season.

This is very bad as ball-handlers and rim-protectors are two of the most important things off the bench, beside shooting which is another element that they lack.

To make matters worse, the Cavs have yet to re-sign prized three-point shooter and media sensation J.R. Smith. The most the Cavs can truly give Smith is around the $10-$12M mark. With Smith and his agent wanting an upwards for $15M, this has created the possibility of Smith leaving Cleveland.

A $3 million gap might not seem like a lot, but when you are cutting corners on the tax and cap room like Cleveland is, it’s very hard to manage.

The Cavs do have around $10M in trade exceptions, but that only works in trades. With the Cavs still needing a backup center and point guard, whilst still not having Smith on the books, they are in trouble.

Yes, they brought in rookie Kay Felder and Summer League Superstar Jordan McRae, but are those really championship caliber players? I don’t think so.

Love’s $22M (per year) contract from last summer continues to look worse as the Cavs are currently tight roping on every transaction they make.

At this point in time, the only way the Cavs can even stagnate or get better from last year is via trade and using their trade exceptions, but who is available?

Rumors of Dwyane Wade being brought over in a deadline deal have circulated, but I don’t buy it. Wade isn’t better than Smith in any aspect of the game currently and is injury prone, so it wouldn’t make much sense anyways.

The Cavs hope is that Smith takes a pay cut and some talented but underperforming player with a pre-2015 contract is available at the deadline. The reason I say pre-2015 signed player is because $15M in trade space ($10M exception and Mike Dunleavy’s $4.8M contract) won’t get them any decent player that has signed in the last two summers (because of the rising cap).

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With teams like Indiana and Toronto looking like better teams on paper overall coming into this season, it’s looking bad for Cleveland. The fear of the Cleveland Cavaliers not even making it back to the Finals, let alone beating that Super Warriors team again, is now here.

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