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The best path forward for the Cavaliers now
After firing head coach Tyronn Lue on Sunday, it's time for the Cleveland Cavaliers to acknowledge the harsh reality of the team's immediate future without the departed LeBron James.
In the aftermath of the decision, it's unclear whether Lue's firing was motivated more by his desire to play veterans -- ESPN's Brian Windhorst reported that Lue and GM Koby Altmann had disagreed over whether to play veterans Kyle Korver and J.R. Smith, while owner Dan Gilbert had pushed for more minutes for rookie point guard Collin Sexton -- or a belief that assistant coach Larry Drew would have more success with the lineup this season.
Whoever is coaching the Cavaliers is unlikely to find success with a roster built to support James, not win games on its own. So the time has already come for Cleveland to look to the future by trading veterans and finding out what its young talent has to offer.
Cavaliers likely to struggle no matter what
Lue was surely right about one thing: Cleveland's young players, particularly Sexton, aren't ready to win now. While there's plenty of reason for optimism about Sexton's potential, at age 19 he's struggling to score efficiently against NBA competition. More than 40 percent of Sexton's shot attempts have been 2-pointers outside 16 feet, per Basketball-Reference.com, and though he's making them at a decent clip (43.5 percent), that's not a recipe for efficient scoring.
Per Second Spectrum's qSQ (quantified shot quality) measure, which looks at the expected value of a player's shots based on their location and type as well as the location of nearby defenders, Sexton is currently taking the league's least efficient shots. His 43.4 percent shot quality ranks last of the 122 players with at least 50 shot attempts, and Sexton is actually slightly underperforming that in terms of his actual effective field goal percentage of 42.6 percent.
At the same time, it's not like the Cavaliers' veterans have been producing good results. Saturday night's 119-107 loss to the Indiana Pacers dropped Cleveland to a league-worst 0-6, with four of those six losses coming by double digits. Only the Phoenix Suns (minus-13.2) have a worse point differential than the Cavaliers' minus-12.8 mark.
Granted, the past two losses have come without Kevin Love, Cleveland's best player after LeBron's departure. But Love was around for a 22-point home loss to the Atlanta Hawks that led Lue to turn back to his veterans, as well as the 16-point home loss to the Brooklyn Nets that followed Lue changing his rotation.
Inevitably, Drew will get better results. The Cavaliers aren't going 0-82. But given that preseason projections were low (Cleveland was pegged for an average of 32 wins by our version using ESPN's real plus-minus) and seem if anything to have overrated the remaining talent on the roster, any improvement is more likely to be a dead-cat bounce than a sustainable turnaround that leaves the Cavaliers contending for a playoff spot. As a result, it's time for Cleveland to look to the future.
Possible trades ahead
At some point soon, the Cavaliers will start thinking about dealing the veterans they accumulated to support their pursuit of championships with James. In particular, Korver and starting point guard George Hill look like reasonable trade candidates given their contracts -- both of which have partial guarantees for the 2019-20 season.
Hill will make $19 million this year, an overpay for a player who hasn't been the same athletically since dealing with a toe injury late in the 2016-17 season. However, just $1 million of Hill's 2019-20 salary is guaranteed, making him effectively an expiring contract. Cleveland could move Hill for another player whose contract is ending or potentially get draft-pick compensation for taking on a longer deal for a less productive player.
At $7.6 million this season and $7.5 million the next -- just $3.44 million of it guaranteed -- Korver is an easier fit into a contender's payroll. As he nears age 38, Korver remains one of the league's premier shooters, a skill that makes him a better fit playing alongside superstars like LeBron than on Cleveland's current roster. A second-round pick is a reasonable expectation in a Korver trade.
Other veterans may be more challenging to move. Though J.R. Smith also has a partial guarantee in 2019-20 ($3.9 million of his $15.7 million salary), his current $14.7 million price tag is costly given Smith's declining production. Even with the renewed emphasis on veterans under Lue, Smith had yet to see more than 20 minutes of action in a game this season. At age 33, his days as a starter are likely past. Center Tristan Thompson will make $18.5 million in 2019-20, fully guaranteed, and given the way he's struggled without James around to set him up (shooting 46.5 percent so far on 2-point attempts), that's a tough sell at the league's easiest position to find contributors.
Of course, the most significant trade candidate is Love, who signed a four-year, $120 million extension this offseason that I speculated could make him more valuable to other teams. The Cavaliers' best chance of getting good return for Love will probably be next summer, when more teams are budgeting max money than there are star players to go around. A deal might be trickier this season. Because of the extension, Love won't be eligible for a trade until January 23, and after that matching salary would likely require Cleveland to take back bad contracts.
If the Cavaliers are hoping a coaching change can shake them out of their current doldrums, they're likely to be disappointed. But if Lue's unwillingness to look to the future caused his demise, Cleveland may now start moving forward from the LeBron era.
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