All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting five
All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting C: Vitaly Potaponko
Our team concludes at center, where the Cavs have drafted some all-time greats like Brad Daughtery and Zydrunas Ilgauskas. In 1996 they had a chance to add an anchor inside to help transition the Cavs out of the Mark Price era, and they took Ukrainian big man Vitaly Potapenko with the 12th pick.
Potapenko played two years of college basketball at tiny Wright State, and he was impressive. He averaged 20.7 points and 7.4 rebounds per game his final year playing in college, and in a 1990s NBA dominated by bigs he seemed like a solid pick when the Cavs came up at 12.
It appears that the competition level of the NBA is different than the Mountain West, and Potapenko struggled from the jump. He fouled like a madman trying to survive defensively inside, he was a below average rebounder for his position, and his scoring was decent but not enough to balance out his other struggles.
The Cavs gave him every opportunity to make it, and he appeared in all but four games the Cavs played in his first three seasons. It was enough, perhaps, for the Boston Celtics to show interest and trade for him to be their starting center. He didn’t exactly do a whole lot there either. His size helped him stick around the league for a surprisingly long 11 year career, but it was always as an incredibly low-usage role player.
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Who else could the Cavs have taken? This is where it really hurts. Here are the three players who went directly after Potapenko in the 1996 NBA Draft: Kobe Bryant, Peja Stojakovic and Steve Nash. Any of those players could have significantly changed the trajectory of the Cavs, and instead they took a ho-hum center. It’s a fitting conclusion to our look at the All-Time Draft Busts team for the Cleveland Cavaliers.