https://craftednba.com/teams/cleveland is kind of an interesting site when considering trades and what we should do. For one thing, it's interesting they believe we have just 4 players who grade out as starters and 2 rotation players.
We hope we have something more like a franchise player, an elite player, an all-star as well as a bunch of stater's and rotation players, but they don't see it that way ... they believe our roster talent level should have us lottery bound.
And I doubt that takes in to account that one of our starter ranked players (aka Ricky) isn't going to play again.
My take away is we need to keep developing what we have and turning players who are making no impact now in to starters/rotation players and/or acquiring them somehow. So keeping our picks isn't necessarily a mistake because we still need to do a lot of work developing this roster.
We can use this web site to look at teams with a surplus of starters/rotation players and ponder if we can trade for them, but we need to be careful reaching deeper or we risk trading projects for projects. For instance, Cam Reddish still looks a lot like an NBA player (and has since high school), but continues to struggle to consistently play like one.
According to craftednba, the Hakws have 10 rotation or better players. Any of them might help us, but none of them include Reddish ... so buy low if you buy at all.
Indiana has 9 rotation or better players, including LeVert, and there's quite a bit to like from his individual stats; we'd just better be convinced his efficiency is going to skyrocket as a Cavalier because his current 51.7 TS% is unacceptable.
Memphis is another team we should be looking at as they have 12 rotation or better players.
And I'm not sure why, but even Dallas supposedly has 10 rotation or better players.
I will say, this site relies alot on advanced plus-minus based stats that are likely prior years informed in various ways, so a team on the come up like the Cavs may very well lag behind, but we do lack quality depth.
I'm sure Koby will be ready and waiting to take advantage of any situation that comes up, but I do expect him to be careful and not throw the team in to the luxury tax over a short term fix that costs us assets that might help fill out the team.
For instance, craftednba doesn't even rate Eric Gordon as rotation quality in spite of recognizing his shooting and secondary playmaking. Those two traits sound pretty good for the Cavs, but they also rate him to be a sieve on defense and overall a much more negative player on defense than he is a positive on offense.
I've heard the name Kenrich Williams come up, I guess the thought is that at 27 he may be too old for the Thunder, but statistically speaking he looks pretty much ideal to slide in to our wing spot. He's only owed $2M this year and next, and it's non-guaranteed. I wouldn't flinch if we gave up a pick for him. He kind of sucks at free-throws and that drags down his TS%, but ideally we'd want to boost his 3pt attempts. He's a good passer, but from what I understand he wouldn't help as a secondary creator. Also reportedly a solid team defender.
