Cavaliers draft: How Cleveland blew the 2018 NBA Draft

Cavaliers draft: How things could have been different

Let’s roll back the clock to June of 2018 and place our thumb on the scale of history. Instead of taking Alabama guard Collin Sexton with the eighth pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, the Cleveland Cavaliers instead select Mikal Bridges, forward out of Villanova.

Bridges didn’t explode out of the gates as an elite player right away, and his brand of basketball is the kind to raise a good team’s ceiling more than a bad team’s floor. The Cavs were likely just as bad during the first few years of his career, and they wouldn’t necessarily have drafted differently; they were bold in taking Darius Garland in 2019 despite Sexton’s presence on the team, and pairing Isaac Okoro and Bridges on the wing defensively would likely still have excited the front office.

Let’s assume the Cavs still draft Evan Mobley, still trade for Ricky Rubio and still add Lauri Markkanen (he was originally added to play the 4 in a rotation with Mobley and Jarrett Allen). This past summer they could have traded Markkanen, LeVert and the future picks for Donovan Mitchell (they almost certainly make the playoffs with Bridges instead of Sexton, so they wouldn’t have Agbaji in tow; they probably toss in Isaac Okoro instead). Any change to an NBA timeline would obviously change a million things, but it’s reasonable they would have had a similar trajectory and made similar decisions along the way.

What’s the team that they have now? It has Darius Garland, Donovan Mitchell, Mikal Bridges, Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen as the core. That’s not an equally-good team; it’s an inner-circle title contender. Bridges fits exactly what this team is missing, and he could easily have been on the Cavs right now.

You can take that what-if game in many directions. What if they drafted Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and paired him with Garland, never making the Mitchell trade? Or took Michael Porter Jr.? The bottom line is that the Cavs missed on their pick in 2018, not taking the elite players on the board who went just two and three picks later. They have built a great team despite that mistake, but it could have been even greater.