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.
All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting PG: Dion Waiters
Thankfully for the Cavaliers and unfortunately for the symmetry of our team, the Cavs haven’t absolutely bombed a pick at point guard. That leaves an open spot for one of the many mistakes at shooting guard, and Dion Waiters gets the call to slide over and fill the spot.
Waiters was a two-year player at Syracuse before entering the draft, and in his best season for the Orange he played just 24.1 minutes per game and averaged 12.6 points as a bench player. Somehow that didn’t bother the Cavs, who took him 4th overall in the 2012 NBA Draft.
One thing the young guard did accomplish on a rebuilding Cavs team was score, as he put up 14.7 points per game as a rookie starting alongside Kyrie Irving. Unfortunately, that’s about all Waiters coudl do, and it’s not like he did so efficiently, either. Across three seasons in Cleveland he shot just 42 percent from the field and 32.8 percent from 3-point range.
The Cavs jettisoned Waiters in 2015 to bring in role players who fit better with LeBron James. He bounced around the league a bit, having a few impressive moments for the Miami Heat before fading to the edge of the NBA world. He won a ring as the last guy on the Los Angeles Lakers’ bench in 2020.
Who else could the Cavs have taken? The 2012 NBA Draft offered plenty of options after Waiters, the most prominent of which was Damian Lillard two picks later. Could you imagine a team with Kyrie, Lillard, LeBron James and Kevin Love?
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.
All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting SF: Luke Jackson
The Cleveland Cavaliers took LeBron James in the 2003 NBA Draft, the exact opposite of a draft bust. LeBron was an instant phenom, but even so the moribund Cavs team around him won only 35 games, so they were back in the lottery with the 10th pick in the 2004 draft ready to find a wingman for LeBron.
They landed on “Cool Hand” Luke Jackson, a 6’7″ small forward out of Oregon. Jackson was a four-year player for the Ducks, growing from a small role as a freshman to an All-American season as a senior averaged 21.2 points, 7.2 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game. This wasn’t a desperate grasp at future potential; Jackson looked like the real deal at Oregon.
He certainly wasn’t in the NBA. He earned just 43 total minutes as a rookie, averaging just 2.9 points per game across 10 appearances. His second season wasn’t much better as he dealt with a wrist injury. That was it for his time with the Cavs, who sent him to a Boston Celtics team who waived him before the season began. Jackson bounced around the league a bit before calling it quits.
Who else could the Cavs have taken? Al Jefferson, Josh Smith, J.R. Smith and Jameer Nelson all went in the next 10 picks, not to mention much later picks such as Kevin martin and Trevor Ariza. Cavs favorite Anderson Varejao went 30th.
All-Time Cleveland Cavaliers draft bust starting PF: Anthony Bennett
Here we have it. The granddaddy of them all. If the Pistons will always have Darko, and Portland will always have Sam Bowie, and the Kings will always have everyone, the Cleveland Cavaliers will always have Anthony Bennett. If this lineup was ranked based on how epic of a bust each player was, Bennett would have been first.
Anthony Bennett spent one season at UNLV and had a decent freshman season, averaging 16.1 points and 8.1 rebounds. Heading into the 2013 NBA Draft the public sphere was buzzing with opinions about Bennett, one of the late risers in the draft process. Which team in the Top 10 would take the risk with Bennett and swing for his upside?
Then the draft came, and the Cavs shocked the world by not taking Victor Oladipo or Nerlens Noel but rather Anthony Bennett. Current ESPN employee Bill Simmons was on set at the draft, and you can actually hear him shout out “whoa” when David Stern announced the pick.
Shane Battier interviews Bennett at the end of that video, and starts it off: Jabbar. Magic. LeBron. Bennett. He should have said: Olowokandi. Kwame. Bargnani. Bennett had nothing going for him from the start, unable to even earn the starting role on a 33-win Cavaliers team as a rookie. He shot 35.6 percent from the field and averaged only 4.2 points per game.
When LeBron James return to the Cavs the next summer, Bennett was essentially a throw-in as part of the Kevin Love trade. He had a career year that season with the Minnesota Timberwolves, starting a whopping 3 games and averaging 5.2 points per game. He would tally just 151 games and four starts for four different teams before his NBA career disappeared just four years in.
Who else could the Cavs have taken? Literally anyone. The Cavs epically bombed this entire draft, taking Sergey Karasev and Carrick Felix in the first 33 picks. Instead of Bennett the Cavs could have taken Victor Oladipo or Nerlens Noel, as most expected. Giannis Antetokounmpo was of course the gem of the 2013 draft, but no one was talking about him at first overall.
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.
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.