Raise the Roof: Why the Cavs should trade Collin Sexton

Why the Cavs should trade Collin Sexton: Evaluating floor vs ceiling

Building out a roster in basketball is not like stacking a tower of blocks, where you simply evaluate their skillset and stack each player on top of each other until you get the highest tower. How players fit together matters; NBA coaches and general managers are instead playing Tetris. If you place the plus-sign piece down you don’t want to put a cube beside it; you need something that fits into the open space.

Collin Sexton is without a doubt a talented basketball player. For all the talk of “someone has to score 20 points” it’s very difficult to average 20 points or more and not be a talented player. Sexton’s 24.3 points per game last season was inside the top 20 in the league. He improved his overall shooting just slightly, got to the free-throw line more and even started to grow as a passer.

Sexton running the show for the Cavs helped to keep them afloat when the roster was in chaos around him. Playing an NBA game without a competent ball-handler who can create some offense for himself or others is a disaster; just ask the Cavs when they played multiple games without Sexton, Darius Garland or Ricky Rubio around the holidays. Things did not go well.

There is no question that Sexton therefore raised the floor of Cleveland’s offense. Putting the ball in his hands yielded enough of a return to be respectable, and his sheer volume led to impressive stat totals.

What about the other side of the spectrum? It’s one thing to take a terrible team and elevate them to mediocre. What about raising a team’s ceiling, improving their chances of competing at the highest levels and winning a title? There are a small handful of players who can dominate the ball like Sexton and perform at a high enough level to drive a team towards contention: players like Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant.

If you aren’t in that superstar tier, then it comes down to scalability. How well do you fit alongside other players? Skills like off-ball gravity, shooting, passing, positional versatility and defense come into play. Only one player can have the ball at a time, so cramming a bunch of on-ball offensive players on one team pays diminishing returns. Put together a collection of playmaking shooters with defensive chops, and suddenly you have the 2017-19 Golden State Warriors.

Collin Sexton is an alright shooter, a poor defender and an average playmaker. He is effectively stuck playing shooting guard, as he is too small to guard up the lineup against wings but not a good enough passer to run the point himself. The odds of Sexton being on a true contender as the primary offensive option is negligible, and he doesn’t scale well to other situations.

In short, Sexton is the kind of player who raises a team’s floor but doesn’t raise its ceiling very much. He can take an offense from 30 to 25, but he isn’t doing much to take it from 8 to 3. The question therefore becomes: do the Cavs need a floor-raiser, or a ceiling-raiser? Until this season the answer was the former, but now excitingly the team is looking for the latter.