The 2018 NBA Draft was an awkward moment in Cleveland Cavaliers history. LeBron James was less than two weeks away from taking his talents to Malibu Beach, but that wasn’t yet official. The Cavs were armed with the eighth overall pick, acquired in the Kyrie Irving trade and clung to at the Trade Deadline in lieu of using it to upgrade the roster around LeBron.
Four years before, the Miami Heat had been in a similar situation with LeBron and used that pick on a player he “liked”, Shabazz Napier, in an effort to convince him to stay. It didn’t work and LeBron returned home to Cleveland. This time around, the Cavs were wise to use it on a building block for the future, not on the soon-to-flee James.
The problem? They used the pick on the wrong player.
The Cavaliers made a mistake in drafting Collin Sexton in 2018
Collin Sexton was a well-known name to even casual fans at the time of the draft. He was a high-octane scorer at Alabama and famously balled out in a game where he was forced to play 3-on-5. He was confident, and relentless and had all of those “intangible” qualities old-school coaches talk about when evaluating players.
Sexton hasn’t been bad, by any means. He averaged 16.7 points per game as a rookie and as many as 24.3 points per game in 2020-21, his third season, and across a five-year career has averaged 19 points per game while shooting 46.4 percent from the field and 38.2 percent from 3-point range. He also had to move to shooting guard because he never developed as a playmaker, is an inconsistent defender and hasn’t proven he can elevate himself and those around him on a good team.
For the eighth pick, adding a high-end bench player (that’s what Sexton is due to his size and play style) isn’t the worst outcome. He has the fourth-most points per game of his draft class. Yet when you look at the players to go directly after him, the case for taking Sexton crumbles.
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.
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.