12. Cleveland Cavaliers
Key additions: Collin Sexton (draft), Sam Dekker (trade), Channing Frye (FA)
Key losses: LeBron James (FA), Jeff Green (FA)
THE LAST TWO OFFSEASONS for owner Dan Gilbert predictably couldn’t have gone much worse. In less than 12 months, the worst owner in the NBA lost LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. One left town on his own terms and the other forced his way out, but both made a conscious decision to leave Cleveland for the good of their careers. And both left due in large part to management/ownership not being able to fulfill their needs.
That’s a pretty good synopsis of how the Cavaliers have been run since LeBron was drafted back in ’03. Gilbert became the team’s majority owner in March of ’05 and launched a never-ending journey to consistently screw everything up.
Gilbert was never able to surround LeBron with enough talent in his first Cleveland stint (it still boggles my mind he didn’t realize this the second the ’07 Finals were over). Dan left him with Zyrdunas Ilgauskas, Mo Williams, and Anderson Varejao to try and navigate to the top of an NBA featuring the Spurs dynasty, prime Kobe Bryant, the Big 3 Celtics, and other formidable foes. James did all he could but the league was too competitive for a single star to win a championship by themselves, and he ultimately left to join a better supporting cast. Gilbert wrote him this letter for his efforts.
King James Gospel
LeBron’s second Cleveland stint was screwed when Gilbert let GM David Griffin’s contract expire just two weeks after the ’17 Finals, pissing James off (it was also screwed on July 4th, 2016). Griffin was a favourite of James who was the face behind building the ’16 championship team. He was the one who signed LeBron back, orchestrated the Kevin Love acquisition, made the Mozgov and Smith/Shumpert deals in ’15, brought Richard Jefferson in that offseason, and pulled off the Frye heist at the ’16 deadline. All brilliant moves. There is no championship in Cleveland without David Griffin.
But in the end, Gilbert chose to hire Koby Altman to replace Griffin, who had no prior managerial experience, depending on how you feel about assistant GM roles. It feels to me like Gilbert hired Altman to pull the strings of a rookie GM. He probably sensed LeBron was going to leave again and wanted more in-house control, looking to be left with something on his roster if or when James departed (meanwhile, Griffin supposedly had deals for Jimmy Butler and Paul George in the works at the time he was let go. A friendly reminder this guy currently co-hosts a radio show on Sirius XM while Vlade Divac is still running an NBA team).
If Gilbert was forcing Altman’s hand in managerial decisions, he was the driving force behind sending Kyrie to Boston for a broken Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, and Brooklyn’s ’18 first rounder (the equivalent of trading in a Lamborghini Aventador for a second generation Mustang with 100,000 miles on it for a cheaper lease and better gas mileage; it’ll save you money and it might look alright to some people, but you’ll always end up missing the Lambo. Gilbert badly wanted the trade to go through to gain draft capital but Brooklyn, with zero incentive to tank, performed better than expected and the pick fell to seventh. A bad gamble).
The deal inevitably went bad, and Jordan Clarkson, Rodney Hood, George Hill, and Larry Nance were brought in to see playoff minutes – it didn’t work out, to say the least. Dwyane Wade (actually played well in Cleveland) was then given away for a penny stock, and LeBron’s fate was signed and sealed – to leave again. The ’18 Cavs were screwed as soon as Gilbert started making decisions.
Cleveland will now enter the 2018-19 season as one of the league’s most unwatchable teams – they were borderline unwatchable last year with LeBron playing some of his most exciting basketball ever. Kevin Love, their only above average NBA player, is destined to average an empty 22-11 with a heinous nightly defensive effort and no less than 25 missed games due to injury. I’d be shocked if he wasn’t shut down by April.
The rest of the supporting cast doesn’t really deserve a paragraph’s worth of my own time. As a guy who watched every second of Cavs basketball from late April to early June, I feel cheated. I was genuinely appalled by every non-LeBron Cav. Succeeding alongside James has never been easy, but it’s certainly easier than a lot of other situations around the league. With it being so rare to play on a championship contender, I thought some of the younger guys would have put forth a much better effort. Not a single one stepped up. We witnessed three of the worst individual playoff runs by guys who made the Finals in recent memory (looking at you, Jordan Clarkson, J.R. Smith, Rodney Hood) and the team’s collective defense resembled a bunch of drunk college kids standing in line at a bar during a Buffalo winter.
Next year will be a big step back for the team. Rookie point guard Collin Sexton has potential, but is far from a finished product. Head coach Tyronn Lue (who could have easily been fired by now) has a lot of work to do. We’ve yet to see him in a situation without LeBron, which gives Cavs fans some semblance of hope that this season won’t be a total wash. But since he doesn’t know when or how to use timeouts, doesn’t call plays, doesn’t game plan, has misused Love for years, and couldn’t motivate me to make a ham sandwich, I wouldn’t bet my mortgage on Lue weathering a LeBron-sized gap in the roster. A friendly reminder to angry Raptor fans that Dwane Casey got outcoached by this guy three years in a row.
The Cavs will likely be back in the lottery for years to come. They can largely thank Dan Gilbert for that.
Cavaliers projected record: 32-50
Cavaliers chances of making the playoffs: 20%
Cavaliers chances of winning the East: <1%