All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting five

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Dajuan Wagner, Cleveland Cavaliers. Photo credit should read DAVID MAXWELL/AFP via Getty Images /

All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting SG: Dajuan Wagner

In the years around the turn of the millennium, the Cleveland Cavaliers were in rough shape. They won no more than 32 games in a season for a five-year stretch, including a 29-53 campaign in 2001-02 that landed them with the sixth pick in the 2002 NBA Draft. Ten years before they would whiff on a shooting guard in Dion Waiters, they committed the original infraction by overdrafting a guard named Dajuan Wagner.

The 6’2″ Wagner played a single season at Memphis where he was both the Conference-USA Rookie of the Year and an All-Conference pick, averaging 21.2 points per game. That boosted him up draft boards and saw him land at sixth to the Cavs. He found scoring in the NBA much more difficult than against Conference-USA foes.

Wagner averaged 13.4 points per game as a part-time starter as a rookie, production built on volume as he was just chucking the ball at the rim and hoping it went in. Things only went downhill from there, as he faded into the background on a team that added LeBron James his second season. He developed a disease called ulcerative colitis that further hampered his abilities to stick as an NBA player, and in all he would play just 103 games in the NBA.

Who else could the Cavs have taken? The best part of taking Wagner was that the Cavs were terrible that next season and won the LeBron sweepstakes. Still, in the picks right after the Cavs chose Wagner players such as Nene (7th),. Amar’e Stoudemire (9th) and Caron Butler (10th) went off the board.