Cavs: Ranking the potential trade returns for 2019-20 expiring contracts

The Cleveland Cavaliers had a good trade deadline this year, but what is really crucial for them to progress in their rebuild is how they handle their players with expiring contracts after next season.

The Cleveland Cavaliers are probably a ways away from seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, or seeing the shore, if you will. Cleveland is arguably the worst team in the NBA at the moment, and they’ll likely be near the cellar of the Association for the next few years. With that being the case, though, they’ve seemed to recognize that for them to be better off in the near future, they’ll need to have a ton of draft picks, and general manager Koby Altman has applied that philosophy this season to a T, as Cleveland has essentially netted seven additional picks this year (how ever way you want to slice it) by way of reportedly dealing Kyle Korver, George Hill, Sam Dekker, Rodney Hood and Alec Burks.

Of those seven picks, two are first-rounders, which is fine. Really, that’s about all Altman and company could have asked for in return for two aging veterans in Korver and Hood, an inconsistent perimeter player in Hood and a solid, but likely bench piece on a contender, in Burks, who’s set to expire at the end of 2018-19, per Spotrac.

Now the Cleveland Cavaliers will have a considerable number of pieces that are due to expire at the end of the 2019-20 season. Those include, as Bleacher Report’s Dan Favale coined it, “salary-matching goodies” in John Henson, Matthew Dellavedova, J.R. Smith, Jordan Clarkson and Tristan Thompson.

Brandon Knight, though he’s far from cheap (he’s due to make over over $15.6 million next season, per Spotrac), is in a contract year, too, and as Favale added, could be an “expiring-contract anchor in another trade next season.”

Cleveland reportedly added Knight via trade on Wednesday (the final details, other than ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reporting that the Houston Rockets would end up trading Nik Stauskas and Wade Baldwin to the Indiana Pacers, and then Indy waiving them both anyhow, per Wojnarowski), were included in a Cavs’ press release.

So let’s move on to ranking the potential returns, from worst to best, for the Cavaliers if they were to trade these expiring pieces, which would be sensible to help their rebuild in the offseason, mid-next season or possibly near next year’s NBA trade deadline.