Team Building 101

 The NBA is a zero sum game, one team wins the title, one team wins each individual game and the way to win is to be better than your opponents.  When you start a rebuild you need to keep in mind that small, incremental changes are absolutely not the way to go if you hope to win a title.  Those small changes happen after you have hit on some huge wins that have put you well above the average team and all your ammo up until that point should be aimed at big upside plays.  

This is obvious but you have to repeat it because bad teams constantly make the mistake of thinking they have already hit a huge upside win and start doing dumb stuff.  The Bulls just went through a year of doing incredibly dumb stuff because they have… Zach Lavine? Does anyone think Lavine is a top 10 player?  Is he honestly in the top 20?  If he is who cares, he would be at the bottom end of the top 20, and if you have the 18th best player in the NBA you are a bit behind a team with a top 10-17 player, a mile behind every team with a top 10 player, ten miles behind the teams with 2 top 10 players and behind teams with 3-4 guys in the 15-45 range.  Their starting point with Lavine is behind 8-12 teams in any given year and so they have to dump multiple first round picks of value to even get into a conversation about being good.  Later it will be revealed that they didn’t get that good, and don’t have that long with the ages of their new shiny toys and will be back to being irrelevant.  

You have to take a serious look at what you have and where they could get to and how much time you have to start discussing team building.  So let’s look at the Cavs’ upside players.  

1.  Collin Sexton.  Good scorer, could be very good.  Decent passing skills, could end up good, terrible defense which could end up passable.  Positional value relatively low.  Zach Lavine is a plausible upside comp for Sexton, Bradley Beal would be a 98th percentile outcome.  In short, not a guy you build around as your main guy, possibly someone you could build around if you had three guys of his value (at different positions, with decent to good skill set fits) at similar ages and under contract control.

2. Darius Garland.  Very difficult to comp here, not many PGs get drafted as young as he was because the PG position has such a high skill ceiling.  More years of development tend to lead to better mastery of skills.  Either you are so elite as a prospect that you go at the very top of the draft (Irving, Rose) or you spend a few years in college (Curry, Lillard), or you go in the teens/20s as a development project (Jrue) or some combination of the above (Lowry).  Without decent direct comps he ends up with a very wide range of outcomes.  Skill wise his shooting/passing/handle/decision making combination has a very high offensive upside.  These are the traits that made Steph Curry and Steve Nash MVP candidates.  The question is then has Garland’s lesser production to date been due to a lower skill level or due to the fact that he is young and inexperienced while playing in the NBA.  His sophomore season was worse than Curry’s rookie year at ~6 months younger, but the gap isn’t huge, and Nash took years before he found his way into All-Star conversations and Garland’s age 21 season compares well to Nash’s age 23 season.  

Don’t interpret this as saying that Garland is going to turn into an MVP candidate, I’m not discussing the more likely and less valuable scenarios because the exercise is to look at upside and how that should impact team decision making.  The conclusion here is simple that Garland is a 2-3 year keeper to make sure if he is on such a track that you don’t swap him out for a shot at someone like Ben Simmons to get better immediately.  

3. Issac Okoro.  His current offensive limitations make him the longest term project on the team, longer than even Mobley who hasn’t played a game yet.  His best case comps are guys like Jimmy Butler and Khris Middleton who took until ages 25 and 24 respectively to hit even 20% usage rates and who are both high quality defenders at their peak.  The good news is that there are comps who became very strong NBA players for him, the bad news is that not only is he unlikely to hit such heights but that you might well have to wait up to 4 years to actually put all the parts in place to hit it. The best case outcome is that like Butler and Middleton he signs a rookie extension before his emergence as an all-star calibre player and you get him on a deal he outperforms for 3-4 years, which of course opens up the possibility that he doesn’t make that leap and you end up overpaying him a bit on that contract and eventually move him in a lateral move.

4. Evan Mobley.  Long, skilled, fluid big men can really impact not only their own teams but how the league plays.  Garnett, Duncan, Bosh- these are good high upside comps who scream ‘hold onto this guy’.  It will be a few years at least until his offensive game comes together in an impactful way.  He needs bulk to run the PnR and is likely going to be next to a PnR specialist for a few years anyway.  His handle and outside shot need work to compliment his strong passing potential.  

No one else on the Cavs really warrants a mention here.

Structurally the Cavs are in good shape, the earliest that they can lose a player against their will is 2 years from now (Sexton taking the QO and then walking) which is very unlikely.  They should be able to retain each of these four for another 5 seasons and they have a 23 year old C signed for 5 seasons to complement these players.  They have time and discretion to make good decisions if they want.  

However it is a zero sum league and you can’t take their baseline talent in isolation, so lets compare to several other teams in somewhat similar spots

1.  Pistons:  Relatively the Cavs future is currently brighter, their total upside from young players is higher however the Pistons could pass them if they added another top 3 pick this year.  

2. Rockets: Again the current Cavs youth scores higher for me than Houston’s, however Houston has more future draft capital and are more likely to score another top pick this season.

3. Orlando:  Once again the Cavs have a better talent base, though this has a lot to do with the immediate recency of Orlando’s rebuild.  

4. OKC: Cavs are well ahead in potential talent, OKC in future draft equity.  Cavs will likely remain ahead until OKC lands a strong pick.  

5. Kings:  Cavs well ahead in long term potential. 

6. NOP:  Zion crushes the Cavs potential, though NOP seems intent on frittering away their remaining draft capital.

7. Memphis:  Well ahead of the Cavs in productive young players with high ceilings.  Mobley has to pan out in a big way to close this gap or JJJ has to continue to struggle with injuries.

This approach puts the Cavs potential in a bit more of a sobering light.  Their rebuild luck has been below average in a league where average luck is bad.  They have yet to land a top two pick and only have a single top 4 pick, and their tear down only netted them one lottery pick in value from Kyrie.  Zion and Ja shifted their respective franchises in a single selection, Luka is so damn good Dallas isn’t even on the rebuild list in his 3rd year.  Not to cry over spilled milk, but had their 2016 and 2017 picks been swapped in position they could have had Trey Young or possibly been the team that traded up for Luka.  You have to play the hand you are dealt but that requires actually examining the hand.

Looking at rebuilds makes it clear that the Cavs need to seek out more chances for positive variance.  They should ride Sexton not because he is going to be the next Bradley Beal, but because they desperately need someone to make that level of leap.  They need to hang onto Garland not because he is Steve Nash reincarnate, but because you aren’t getting a Steve Nash level player any other way in the near term.  

This is emphatically not to say that the Cavs future isn’t bright, Garland and Sexton both give support to the notion that this front office is good at identifying players with upside, they did just land the #3 pick in a draft with at least 3 strong prospects, and they haven’t dumped future assets into getting off past poor/unlucky decisions (Love) so they still have bites at the apple or trade fodder coming every year.