Cavs: How Collin Sexton and Kyrie Irving compare through three seasons

The Cleveland Cavaliers are faced with a difficult decision over the next year. Their high-scoring shooting guard, Collin Sexton, is eligible for an extension on his contract before next season begins; if the Cavs do not give him one, he will be a restricted free agent next summer.

As happens with many Top 10 picks, Sexton has been playing on a rebuilding team, a team not prioritizing winning and which is stocking the roster and rotation with newly-drafted players. On a team not optimized to compete, how do the Cavs put Sexton’s numbers into context and predict how he will make an impact when the Cavs are good again?

To help the Cavs understand how Collin Sexton has played thus far, they can compare him to the start of Kyrie Irving’s career

Some players put up numbers in a losing context, and then take off when the talent around them improves. Devin Booker is a recent example of this kind of player. The flip side is a player who puts up numbers as a young guard on a bad team, but cannot translate that into true impact on a good team. Monta Ellis or Brandon Jennings could qualify as examples.

Where does Sexton fall? How has he helped the Cavs win, even when he hasn’t be supported by a positive supporting cast? Thus far it looks like he has not done much to help the team win; is that his fault? And is that a death sentence for his star-upside? What does it mean to evaluate a player’s “winning impact” when they’re on a losing team?

Recently a Cavs fan on Twitter asked a question that is worth answering. It was in response to Sexton dropping to 11th in a recent 2018 NBA Redraft. If the conclusion is that Collin Sexton is not a “winning player” — a term tossed around too flippantly and often just meaning that that player’s team hasn’t won, which is reductionistic and unhelpful; in this context it means impacting the game on multiple levels in ways that contribute to winning in a positive team context — if Sexton is not such a player, was Kyrie Irving when he was in a similar situation?

Kyrie Irving was another highly-drafted guard with a gift for scoring, and the start of his career was similarly on a bad team adding young talent. After three seasons the team around Irving took off as LeBron James returned home and Kevin Love was brought in via trade. No such savior is coming for this season’s Cavs, which means even if Cleveland puts off the decision on paying Sexton they won’t have an appreciably better context from which to evaluate him.

Is Sexton’s scoring impactful, or somewhat just filling the void – someone has to take the shots, after all. Cleveland can compare Sexton’s play to how Kyrie Irving’s career began to see whether Sexton is on an unmistakable trajectory towards stardom, or whether he is putting up numbers just because he’s playing minutes. The answer, of course, is likely somewhere in the middle.

The Cleveland Cavaliers were bad when Irving first joined. The team won 19 games the season before drafting him, and won an average of 26 games over his first three seasons. Sexton’s Cavs teams have been similarly bad, and in fact slightly worse; they would have averaged 22.5 win per 82-game season.

In similar contexts, then, how did each perform? Let’s break down their production in a number of areas to determine if both played similarly as young players, or if there is a difference to be found. That can help understand Sexton’s current trajectory and how the Cavs should value him in contract negotiations.