Crunch 99 wrote:I am a more patient fan than most fans. I like where the Cavs stand 53 games in to the season. You've got a pretty solid lock on 4th place and HCA for first round; Mitchell is taking a couple less fga and seems to no longer be relentlessly pursuing an unnecessary 30 ppg average; his apg are up slightly up, and Mobley's ppg has climbed a bit from 15.1 ppg the first half of season to 16.8 ppg the second half of the season. That is progress.
My amateur advice is to do whatever is necessary to hold on to HCA, while at the same time trying to make sure Mitchell arrives at the playoffs as fresh as possible. I know he allegedly arrived at Cavs' camp in his best shape ever, but I'd really like to see him average 32mpg or less the rest of the way. Imo, he has had some seasons with the Jazz where he looked a little worn down towards the end of the season, and that was with playing less mpg than he has been playing with the Cavs.
MItchell's first 26 games: 36.7mpg, 29.7 ppg on 20.7 fga, 60.3 TS%, with 3.8 rebs and 4.6 apg.
MItchell's last 26 games: 34.2mpg, 24.4p pg on 18.9 fga, 57.5 TS%, with 4.1 rebs and 5 apg.
I don't think it's a matter of patience.
A lot of time has passed and we've seen the results of this trade for both sides so far. Mitchell has been great, outstanding even, despite some poor performances here and there. And that's totally fine. Lauri's had some poor performances here and there too. That's bound to happen.
The issue at hand is one that we were hoping wouldn't pop up but it's reared its ugly head: we lack the assets needed to make the necessary changes to the team to fix the issues that are hindering us. On top of still needing to find another legitimate 3/D wing who could be a consistent starter at SF, it's very clear we need a backup big who can help with defense and rebounding. Bickerstaff is dead set on playing only Allen and Mobley at center and while it hasn't backfired on us yet, I'd rather not hold out hope that this continues to be the case. And unfortunately we don't have a choice.
This means that we are now only left with two options: hope that we can land a key player in free agency who can fill the holes in our team (which will be tough as Cleveland isn't a popular FA destination, but seeing as to how the team has a very bright future ahead of them, that might help, but we'll have a lot of cap space so there's that), or trade one of our key rotation players and hope to get a few extra really good players out of it. This means one of our regular rotation guys, or Jarrett Allen, or dare I say Donovan Mitchell. I've suggested before that Mitchell being traded could happen down the road, and I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
There's another problem here too. As I mentioned above, we've seen the results of the trade for both sides. I fully expected Lauri to have a breakout season when he got traded to Utah, but he's been better than I was expecting. And another issue is how good Ochai has looked whenever he plays. He's remarkably consistent from deep (shooting 39% this season from there) and from the times I've watched him play, he's looked good defensively. He could have been very useful to this Cavaliers team and having Lauri around would have meant allowing him time to play at the four whenever Mobley moved to center or was sitting. We would have had more options in regards to our rotation, and still would have had the assets needed to make additional moves to solve the issues that were still present on our team.
So it becomes a question of whether or not getting Mitchell was ever necessary in the first place. And to be totally honest... I'm starting to think it wasn't.
I still think we would have been around where we are at now or even better had we not made the trade. And I think we ultimately would have been better off in the long run if we didn't do it. Our biggest problem before we made the trade was that we didn't have a wing player outside of Garland who could create his own shot and score from anywhere on the floor. But by trading away Lauri and Ochai, we created more problems than we solved. We have that secondary player who could create and score from anywhere (and he's REALLY great at it), but now we lack depth at the SF position and don't have the luxury of switching Lauri over to the four or even at center when needed (on top of the huge matchup problem he created by us having three elite seven footers in the lineup). And because we don't have the assets to do it, we've backed ourselves into a corner where we have to be very careful with who we decide to give up in trades and we have to hope we can just find the players in the offseason to fix the problems we currently have within our team.
But the good news is that we've seen what kind of assets you can get back for superstar players. Donovan Mitchell is a superstar, whether people want to admit it or not. While I don't think he can get what the Nets were able to get from Phoenix for Durant, I absolutely think that if Cleveland decides to one day trade Mitchell, they shouldn't have any issues getting not only the players they need to fix their roster, but the picks needed to allow us to continue to build off of drafts and/or gain even more talent through trades in the future.
So in the end, despite my concerns, this trade is still ultimately a win for Cleveland. But people aren't wrong when they suggest that we might have been better off not making that trade in the first place. Our team is so young anyways and the East is stacked, so what's the rush?
I don't think I'm the one to decide which problem is harder to fix, but I do think t
... we were wrapping up our 3 in 4, so, at least the day off seemed to help with the shooting.