Cavs 2022-2023 season preview part 1

 Average age of a team is a rough rule of thumb for improvement potential, but you can get a better approach by comparing likely improving players against likely declining players for teams with a lot of consistency in their roster from year to year.  One simple way to do this is to bin players into three categories

1.  Young enough to be improving.  Roughly ages 24 and under

2. Likely to be fairly flat.  Ages 25 to 29

3. Likely to be in decline.  Ages 30+

It’s far from a perfect measure, you want to take into account a 6th year 24 year old probably doesn’t have as much room to grow as a 2nd year 20 year old, and plenty of players have maintained their productivity into their early 30s without a notable decline, but we can’t make those adjustments later.  

How the Cavs roster shakes out, ages using Bball-references cut off for the 22/23 season, and using the top 11 in total mins from last season + Sexton

Group 1:  8,867 total mins

Group 2:  5,902 mins 

Group 3:  2,635 mins

This gives us a naive 3.4:1 ratio of likely to improve against likely to decline this year.  I’d argue it is even more strongly leaning toward improvement as this is counting just turned 25 year olds  Lauri (1,878) and Lamar (1,015) as having no chance to improve, as well as not yet 26 year old Dean Wade.  Pushing against this somewhat is Rubio’s significant injury that likely makes this season a larger decline year than your typical age 32 season.  

To compare this to another young, playoff hopeful Eastern Conference team:  The Charlotte Hornets

Group 1:  7,027 (giving full credit for Miles Bridges playing next season, which is not obvious, not counting Bouknight, Thor or Jones)

Group 2:  7, 218

Group 3:  3,357

The Cavs are not simply young, they are very young and they have opportunities for substantial internal improvement all over their roster.  I am going to follow this post with individual breakdowns of upside for the coming season for these players.  Taken individually they will look like nutty homerism expecting a rapid ascension of the Cavs to a dynasty like status with stars at virtually every position.  That is not the intention, the purpose here is to show where the ceilings are higher than most think and present the fact that only one or two need to come through for the Cavs to be substantially better than expected this coming year.  The odds that all come through are tiny, but the odds that at least one does is reasonable and that one does while a few others show moderate improvement is also reasonable.