Cavaliers draft: How Cleveland blew the 2018 NBA Draft

Cavaliers draft: How they blew the 2018 NBA Draft

When the Cavaliers traded for the pick they would eventually use on Collin Sexton they hoped it would land much higher in the draft, and if it had then they could potentially have landed a player like Luka Doncic, Jaren Jackson Jr. or Trae Young. Yet picking at No. 8, those players were all off the board already. They can’t be blamed for that.

Yet it’s the players who went just after Cleveland’s pick that will haunt them. Kevin Knox went ninth, and he was a phenomenal bust, but the next two picks hurt. Mikal Bridges went 10th overall to the Philadelphia 76ers, who immediately flipped him to the Phoenix Suns. Bridges has become the draft’s best perimeter defender and perhaps the league’s, with a deadly outside shot and developing on-ball creation skills as well. He looks like a future All-Star.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander went 11th, and he is already an All-Star and seems on track for an All-NBA selection. He is one of the three players to average more points per game than Sexton from this class (Young and Doncic being the others) and has become a true on-ball superstar for the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Basketball Reference has a “VORP” statistic that they use (Value Over Replacement Player) that estimates a player’s impact over an average player for the time they are on the court. Bridges has accrued 9.9 VORP in his career, fourth in this class. Gilgeous-Alexander has 12.7, good for third. Sexton? He has -0.7, outside the top 50. He’s sandwiched in-between Svi Mykhjailiuk and Josh Okogie.

That’s just one statistic, but most other advanced statistics agree. While Sexton has honed that one skill, his personal scoring, he isn’t a contributor to winning basketball in anything approximating a large role. Bridges and Gilgeous-Alexander are at the highest levels, and the entire course of the Cavs’ rebuild would look different if they had added them instead.