Cleveland Cavaliers Blog

  Your number 14 selection:  Ochai Agbaji.   I’m not going to slow play this one, I don’t like the selection, which is more or less why I’ve been low key ignoring him in other pieces so far in the season preview. The first issue is that 3pt shooting is wildly overrated in the NBA.  Not that it isn’t important, but being really, really good at it- great even- can still leave you struggling to find a role while yammering fools talk about how you ‘always need more shooting’ as if its some unique talent.  Joe Harris led the league twice in 3pt %, and has posted 4 full seasons on good volume (350+ attempts) at > 41%, and he didn’t find a good rotation role until his age 26 season after he had been dumped by a pair of teams.  Seth Curry is a 44% career 3pt shooter who didn’t find a role until he was 26, until his 5 team- and that team let him walk for a 1 year/2.8 million dollar deal.   OK, so how about more direct comparisons.  Ochai was a...

  So let’s talk dynasties.  In the ‘00-’01 season a 25 year old Allen Iverson won the MVP, carried his team to 56 wins, a finals appearance, and handed the only loss all post season to a Laker’s juggernaut.  That is a good peak, but there was no heft behind it.  56 wins was the only time they cracked 50 wins with Iverson at the helm, and they missed the playoffs (twice) more often than they made the 2nd round (once) with AI after that run.  For AI’s ‘prime’ his team wasn’t a contender and was fighting to make the playoffs, 1st ballot Hofer on the roster for a decade and you aren’t even close to a dynasty. OK, well that was only 1 star, how about two stars?  We just watched Utah break up their duo.  A 21 year old Mitchell and a 25 year old Gobert won 48 games together and made the 2nd round of the playoffs, they had some better regular season success but ended with more 1st round exits (3) as 2nd round exits (2) in their 5 years together.   Ac...

  Our starting point here is the players the Cavs have kept from last season to this season (counting Sexton and not dropping anyone year which would have to happen).  How good was this group last season?  In 5,000 possessions with 5 of Allen, Mobley, Lauri, Sexton, Garland, Rubio, Okoro, Osman, Love, Levert, Wade, Windler and Stevens the Cavs were +5.6/100 with that 13 man rotation.  That net rating would have tied them for 4th in the entire league and 2nd behind the Celtics in the East, with a projected record of 55-27.  That is a little favorable to the Cavs because I am not running top 12 rotations for every other team, but this is just a starting point. A healthy Cavs team from last season with no additions and no internal improvement would project at a 55 win pace, an 11 game increase on last seasons win total, and a number that typically gets attached to a top 4 seed in the East (and would at times be the #1 seed).  I count 8 players that are favorit...

  Isaac Okoro:  Okoro’s sophomore improvement has been dramatically underrated by fans, partially because his rookie year was bad enough that improvement can still look like not great play, but largely I think this is scoring bias.  Isaac doesn’t score much and didn’t increase his usage (actually decreased) and a jump in ppg is the easiest way to catch eyeballs.  In terms of counting stats per 100 he was flat in scoring, blocks, assists and fouls, and only showed notable improvement in offensive rebounding and TOs.   Advanced metrics tell a very different story.  His scoring was flat, but his efficiency jumped a good amount, and his three shooting splits (2pt%, 3pt% and FT%) all increased, his FTr increased, shots at the rim and finishing improved.  His broad suite of advanced stats improved as well, and by large amounts.  His WS went from 0.9 to 4.2, BPM from -5.1 to -1.7 and his LEBRON popped from -3.55 to -0.48.   To put that LEBRON i...

I have a different view on lineups and player value than is typical.  The easiest way to explain this is the concept of the offensive player whose teams are consistently strong defensively, and the best example I know of this is Allen Iverson Iverson’s 3rd season was his first trip to the playoffs and the first time on a > 0.500 team, and he scored 26.8 ppg on 51% TS.  His defensive rating that year was 99, down from 106 the year before and down from 112 the year before that.  Had Iverson become a wildly better defender in those few years?  No, probably better, but not a huge leap better, what happened was the 76ers management found a way to use his greatest gift- that is the ability to score at volume without regard to the quality of his teammates.  So instead of surrounding him with other offensive all-stars they picked strong defenders with limited offensive games on the cheap.  Mutombo, Snow, Hill.  Low usage defenders.  Here are the Offens...

  Slim Duncan, The Skinny Ticket, The Mostrich.  So Evan Mobley hasn’t earned himself a real nickname yet, but he has a lot of time.  How good will he be?  He’s not Tim Duncan, which probably disappoints those who don’t remember how goddamn good Duncan was, and how young (yeah 4 years in college but his rookie year was still age 21, and he was an all-star on a 56 win team that went to the 2nd round in a conference with 5 teams that won 56+ games that season and then there is the whole winning a title in his second season fluff on top of that rolling through Garnett’s Wolves, Shaq’s Lakers, Sabonis’ Blazers and the last relevant Knicks team 15-2).     Sorry, I got hung up on Mobley not being Tim Duncan. Since we started by cutting his ceiling down let’s set his floor a little.  Two odd looking comps:  Joakim Noah and Draymond Green, both of these guys show how you can make an impact defensively where your instincts are more valuable than ...

I had one of those very pointless online arguments at the end of Garland’s rookie year with what can only be described as people who didn’t believe he would ever be a notable NBA player.  Maybe a starting level PG if we were lucky.  Now I wasn’t being prescient in my statements comparing him to Nash, Dame or Curry, but I did make those statements so I will rehash them here quickly. It is almost impossible to tell what a 20 year old PG will end up being unless they are good enough to warrant the #1 overall pick.  Sure the occasional Kyrie Irving comes along and Derrick Rose was pretty dang good as a rookie but a lot of who we think of as GREAT NBA point guards weren’t even in the league at that age.  Steve Nash didn’t even manage to start until he was 24, didn’t average double digit points per game until he was 26 and ended up a 1st ballot HOFer.  Steph Curry?  2 months away from being 22 as a rookie and he had 3 years of college and a lifetime with an NBA p...

C’est la vie.  One of the few young guys that it is hard to see upside for, which is surprising given a solid rookie year followed by what looked like a substantial step forward in season 2 in which he increased his USG, FTr, FT% and reb%.  His TS mark was flat though due to a decrease in his 2pt% which was led by a drop in his finishing at the rim.  He doesn’t finish well around the rim for a big, but he does OK for a forward- the past two seasons at 65%, with his Chicago season being 37th percentile and his Cleveland season being 49th. Why is Lauri a big?  He’s tall, that is roughly it.  Seriously, that is why he has been put at PF/C for his whole career until a 241 possession accidental experiment in his final year in Chicago.  Just as a reminder that 3 big lineup wasn’t with two defensive studs which is what everyone is crediting his success to last year, 186 of those possessions came with Vucevic at C- go look up his reputation, and those lineups had a...

  Why the fuck is Collin Sexton not valued by the NBA broadly?  I don’t understand this, to the point where I only want to rant about it anymore, so rant I shall. Same age comparison (actually Sexton is 4 months younger here) Sexton’s 2nd and 3rd year averages vs Player X MPG  Sexton:  34.1 PlayerX:  33.8 PPG Sexton: 22.5 PlayerX: 22.7 APG Sexton: 3.6 PlayerX: 4.0 TOs Sexton: 2.7 PlayerX: 2.6 TS Sexton: 56.7% PlayerX: 54.5% FTr  Sexton: .297 PlayerX: .240 No suspense:  Player X is Donovan Mitchell’s first two seasons in the league, and here we live in a world where the discussions are should the Knicks give up 5, 6 or 7 1st round picks for Mitchell and should Sexton be a 6th man or a starter.   Don’t give me this ‘Mitchell’s a winner, Sexton was good stats on a bad team’ garbage either.  Portland just gave Simons a 4/100 deal.  They were 13-17 in his starts (25-32 in all games played) on a team that was built to win this year with D...