All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting five

The NBA Draft is a difficult game to play. Predicting the futures of teenagers and trying to pick the best of them is a daunting task, and it’s one that NBA teams fail at quite frequently. The Cleveland Cavaliers absolutely have their fair share of NBA Draft success stories….but the Cavs also have a history littered with failures.

The common parlance for a draft failure is a “bust” which can be applied both to the player drafted who falls short of expectations (he was a bust) or to the team who made the error in choosing that player ahead of other, more successful ones.

The Cavs haven’t always nailed their draft picks over the years. Introducing the All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting five

Some player and team failures in NBA history are iconic, from the Detroit Pistons taking Darko Milicic ahead of Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony, to the Portland Trail Blazers taking Sam Bowie ahead of Michael Jordan in 1984 because they already had a shooting guard.

Cleveland has had its fair share of missteps too, so let’s look back on some of the Cavs’ biggest draft mistakes over the years. We’ll balance how a player underperformed their draft slot with what players would have been available instead to evaluate just how badly the Cavs performed in drafting each prospect.

To that end, we’ll assemble our “All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers Draft Bust Starting 5” from point guard to center. We’ll start off with a slight positional fudge, and partway through we’ll get to possibly the greatest draft bust of all time.