Cleveland Cavaliers: Paul Pierce believes Duke could beat the Cavs

The Cleveland Cavaliers have not started the season off too well; they are 1-10 on the season. That’s why former NBA star Paul Pierce believes the current iteration of the Duke Blue Devils could beat Cleveland.

The Cleveland Cavaliers aren’t going to win many games this season, and now fans are pointing to next year’s NBA Draft to be the silver lining for what will likely be a bleak rest of the 2018-19 season. The Cavaliers’ essentially tanking roster turnout is the reason that Paul Pierce thinks Duke could beat Cleveland, as he said on ESPN’s NBA Countdown.

That is a fairly spicy take, as the Cavaliers (at least by title) are an NBA team. Their players, such as Rodney Hood, Cedi Osman, Kevin Love, Tristan Thompson, Jordan Clarkson and Collin Sexton, are paid to play basketball. Despite them not projecting to be a postseason bubble team this year (as I thought they could be before the season), I still think they would beat a group of young kids by a considerable margin, given how an NBA teams’ depth eventually would take over.

Yes, Duke is ridiculously talented this season; they had the consensus top three recruits in the country in their respective class in R.J. Barrett, Zion Williamson and Cameron Reddish. The Blue Devils absolutely destroyed the Kentucky Wildcats to begin the NCAA Men’s Basketball season, and they’ll be one of the favorites to win a championship this year.

Nonetheless, the Cleveland Cavaliers (in my opinion), would handle business against the college kids. Pierce is a guy who had an incredible NBA career with 19.7 points, 5.6 rebounds and 3.5 assists per game in 19 seasons, but this was just a classic throw-the-gas-on-the-fire hot take.

I truly hope the Cavaliers and head coach Larry Drew use it as motivation for the near future, and get things turned around in the next few years (granted, I want Barrett in a Cleveland uniform in 2019-20, though).