jbk1234 wrote:toooskies wrote:jbk1234 wrote:
Why are the Cavs giving up all that draft capital in addition to Mitchell? Is Cooper Flagg the next LBJ? Has he won MVP without stepping foot on an NBA court?
I'm sorry, but there's no guarantee he's ever as good as Mitchell. We have not yet conveyed the first pick we owe from the Mitchell trade. I'm not stacking 3 more firsts on top of 4 for a time period when Mobley won't be even be under contract.
I was just cutting out the Lakers and Allen while conveying similar value to Dallas, not advocating for it. Generally, simpler deals are more realistic. Allen to the Lakers was just a way to put the article on the Laker feeds at ESPN.
That said— Flagg is a top 3-5 prospect of the decade (behind Zion and Wemby and not sure who else). He’s under team control for 8 years. Mitchell is under team control for 2 years, the Cavs are waiting for Mobley to become their best player, and Mitchell might be in the way of that.
As many wins as the Cavs put together in the regular season, they collectively didn’t look ready to win a championship in the playoffs anytime soon. Flagg would be a soft reset. You still get to not care about missing draft picks because Mobley/Garland/Flagg should win games for a decade and swaps are unlikely to convey to a team whose stars will all be gone by then.
For Dallas, a top 5 MVP candidate for three role players absolutely should make you a better team. Mitchell in Klay’s place is the direction I’d go here.
Both are natural directions for both teams— Cavs keep selling the future with a younger roster, Dallas gets serious about actually building a contender rather than hoping a rookie pushes them over the top.
I'd sooner trade Allen with Mitchell than make it 7 years worth of owed draft capital, and I'm disinclined to trade them both for Flagg. Seven years of owed draft capital is way, way too much.
I'm old enough to remember when Bill Simmons coined the phrase rigging for Wiggins. The Cavs ended up adding to firsts to him to get Love.
And here's a comparison of Wiggins to Flagg: https://tankathon.com/players/compare?players=cooper-flagg--andrew-wiggins
Flagg wins literally every stat except 3PA Rate and FTA Rate, which are more descriptive of style than effectiveness. Flagg has nearly double the BPM of Wiggins. These aren't prospects in the same class. Add to that the fact that Flagg took his team to a Final Four and WIggins didn't even make the NCAA tournament.
If Flagg's value is somewhere in between Mitchell's and Mitchell's + all the draft capital, you could figure out a way to work it out in the present rather than the future. Possibly slide Tyson or CPJ into Dallas's space and remove the swaps.
zimpy27 wrote:What about including LeBron in the deal and just making it between Lakers, Cavs, Dallas?
Because of apron restrictions on Cleveland and Dallas, both teams need to take in less salary than they send out. Chicago is serving that purpose here because they have a bit of cap space to work with in the 2024-25 league year (and they served that purpose in the original trade-- other teams could do something similar).
The Lakers are up against an apron too and can't add salary either. The Cavs will be above the 2nd apron even after this deal, so they can't aggregate and take LeBron unless they cut more salary-- more than Chicago can take off their hands in the 2024-25 league year and I think more than anybody can take.
Push things to the 2025-26 league year (i.e. agree to the trade whenever, execute it on July 1) and you open more teams that could absorb salary to get Cleveland under the 2nd apron to aggregate-- NT MLEs, more usable trade exceptions that teams can use without going over caps, Brooklyn's cap space, etc. But Mitchell's salary goes up $10m.
Waiting even longer, you could wait till after Flagg signs with Dallas and then wait 30 days, in which case his salary (($13.8m?) counts in the matching and Mitchell's salary increase is more than mitigated. Dallas then only needs to add $32.5m in 2025-26 additional salary with Flagg going out instead of $35.6m of 2024-25 salary, and they could do that with Klay + (Washington or Gafford) + Brandon Williams (minimum). So in theory it could be a two-team deal at that point! (Although Dallas would be too close to the 2nd apron to fill out the roster and would need to cut some money/make further trades to complete a valid roster.)
