The world of NBA transactions can be a weird one. Sometimes a trade lands a team a foundational player who anchors their success for years and years; think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar joining the Los Angeles Lakers, or Kevin Love winning a title with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Other players zip through an organization so quickly it’s like they were never there.
It’s that second category that we are going to peer into today. Which players throughout the history of the Cleveland Cavaliers have officially joined the team, only to never actually play a single minute? WIth an honorable mention to Seth Curry, the famous little brother who played just nine minutes for the Cavs before his career later blossomed, we’re looking for players who literally didn’t play a single minute for the team.
Let’s look at nine players who passed through the Cavaliers like a whisper in the night, starting with a recent draft pick.
If the Cleveland Cavaliers had won either of their Play-In Tournament games at the end of the 2021-22 season, they would have made the playoff field and sent their first-round pick to the Indiana Pacers. Instead, they lost, landing in the lottery and keeping the pick, which landed at No. 14 in the 2022 Draft.
The Cavs used the pick on Ochai Agbaji, a wing out of Kansas that looked like an excellent fit for what they needed. Agbaji would never play a minute for the Cavaliers, nor make it to Training Camp, as two months later they sent Agbaji to Utah as part of the Donovan Mitchell trade.
The 6’5″ swingman had a perfectly fine rookie season, slowly working his way into the rotation and eventually the starting lineup as the Jazz deconstructed their roster after the Trade Deadline. He should settle in as a solid 3-and-D wing for the Jazz; the Cavs found their version in free agency this summer with Max Strus.
Jordan Bell is a name known to the Cleveland Cavaliers, but it’s not because of his time in Cleveland. Bell was a second-round pick in the 2017 NBA Draft, going 38th overall to the Chicago Bulls, who promptly traded him to the Golden State Warriors.
Bell would become a rotation big for the Warriors over the next few seasons, including a rotation role in the 2018 Finals when the Warriors swept the Cavaliers in four games. Despite being undersized at 6’8″ he had explosive athleticism and tended to live above the rim on both ends of the court.
The Warriors didn’t retain Bell’s services in the summer of 2019, and he began to ping pong around the league for the next few seasons. He would technically be on eight teams over the next three seasons, playing a total of 36 games for five of them. That included a brief stay in Cleveland; he signed as a free agent in June of 2020, then was traded before he ever played a game to the Los Angeles Lakers in return for JaVale McGee.
There is another connection between Bell and the Cavaliers as well, dating back before the former Oregon Duck was ever drafted. The 2017 second-round pick that would be used on Bell was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2011 in the J.J. Hickson trade, then sent to Chicago for Luol Deng in 2014.
Basketball fans will remember Allen Crabbe, a sharpshooting wing, for his part in the gold rush of 2016. That summer the salary cap took a drastic leap as new television money rolled in, leading to such outrageous outcomes as Kevin Durant signing with the 73-win Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers backing up the Brink’s truck for former Cavaliers Timofey Mozgov and Luol Deng.
It was also the summer that Allen Crabbe got paid. The Brooklyn Nets had a lot of money to spend and nothing to do with it, so they signed some restricted free-agent offer sheets. One of those was for Crabbe, who went from bench shooting guard to highly overpaid bench shooting guard when the Portland Trail Blazers matched his four-year, $75 million offer sheet.
The deal immediately became an albatross, and the Blazers essentially dumped him on the Nets a year later, who kept him for two seasons before dumping him on the Atlanta Hawks. Crabbe was a 38.7 percent career shooter from deep who couldn’t stick around in the league past the age of 27 due to injuries and a degrading jumper.
It could have been the Cleveland Cavaliers right in the middle of all of that drama, as they were the team to originally draft Allen Crabbe with the 31st pick of the 2013 NBA Draft. They promptly traded him to the Trail Blazers for a pair of future second-round picks, letting another team deal with the roller coaster ahead.
Dwight Powell is the NBA center who cannot die, continuing to play and start for the Dallas Mavericks despite their annual attempts to replace him. Kristaps Porzingis, Christian Wood, Willie Cauley-Stein, DeAndre Jordan and Nerlens Noel are all gone, and Powell remains.
The 6’10” Canadian center first arrived on the Dallas Mavericks as a part of the Rajon Rondo trade in December of 2014, with Jae Crowder highlighting a return package to the Boston Celtics. Powell was hardly a long-time Celtics player, however, landing in Boston just three months earlier.
Powell was drafted in June of 2014, and teams promptly began playing hot potato with the Stanford center. The Charlotte Bobcats drafted him, then turned around the next day and traded him to the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs signed Powell, then found out that LeBron James was coming and moved half of their bench to the Celtics to clear up roster spots for win-now veterans.
All told, then, Powell was on three different teams in the first two months of his career without playing a single game, then suited up for only five games in Boston before landing in Dallas…where he has played for the last nine seasons and racked up 582 appearances. Basketball is asymmetrical sometimes.
A player very well known to modern basketball fans, Tyus Jones first erupted onto the scene as the closer on a star-studded Duke Blue Devils team that won the National Championship in 2015, propelling Jones from a multi-year college player to a one-and-done first-round pick.
It was the Cleveland Cavaliers who drafted him in the 2015 NBA Draft. Coming off of their first NBA Finals appearance of LeBron James’ return, the Cavs decided to save money by then moving Tyus Jones for a trio of second-round picks, one of which they used on longtime Cleveland role player Cedi Osman (we don’t have to dwell on the other two players; Rakeem Christmas and Justin James played just 102 career games between them).
Jones thus began his career with the Minnesota Timberwolves, establishing himself as one of the best backup point guards in the entire league and playing high-leverage basketball behind the oft-injured Ja Morant. Most recently, Jones has landed in Washington and could be the full-time starter for the first time in his career.
Seemingly since trading him away the Cavaliers have been interested in a return, as Jones has been named as a potential trade target or free agent target at various times. Perhaps one day he will come full circle and return to the Cavaliers.
Here is where we will get technical with our criteria. Our thesis for this piece is to look at players who were officially on the Cleveland Cavaliers but never played a single minute. Andrew Bogut makes the cut because he technically did not play a minute for the Cavs: he made it just 56 seconds.
Bogut was the first overall pick in the 2005 NBA Draft, establishing himself as a defensive anchor for the Milwaukee Bucks despite struggling with various injuries. He was then the centerpiece of a trade that sent Monta Ellis to Milwaukee and landed Bogut on the Golden State Warriors, helping to propel them into the playoffs and a few years later starting for two NBA Finals teams and one championship alongside Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green.
In the summer of 2016 the Warriors were reloading after the Cleveland Cavaliers came back from a 3-1 deficit to beat them in the NBA Finals, and they jumped at a chance to sign Kevin Durant. The cost was Bogut, who was moved to the Dallas Mavericks to clear cap space. After playing most of a season with the Mavs he agreed to a buyout and signed with the Cavaliers for the stretch run and a presumed rematch with his old team.
That rematch never happened, unfortunately, as Bogut’s debut was disastrous. He came off the bench on March 6th against the Miami Heat and broke his leg just 56 seconds later. He would end up heading overseas shortly thereafter, starring in Australia’s NBL, then return to the Warriors for one last run in 2018-19.
Here is a name that most Cleveland Cavaliers fans were not expecting, but Jamal Crawford did technically spend a moment of his career as a part of the organization. The Seattle basketball legend was actually drafted by the Cavs with the eighth pick of the 2000 NBA Draft.
That was in the midst of a dark chapter of the franchise’s history, when the Cavs were cycling through players trying to find a group that could help them win more than a handful of games (it would be another half-decade before they accomplished that behind LeBron James). That mediocrity landed them the eighth pick in the 2000 draft.
The Cavs had their eye on another prospect, Chris Mihm, and didn’t want to miss out on the chance to draft him. They traded cash to the Chicago Bulls to swap first-round picks after the draft, getting back Mihm and sending Crawford to the Windy City.
Mihm would play 3.5 unremarkable seasons with the Cavaliers before bouncing around on the Celtics and Lakers to finish his career. Crawford, on the other hand, played in 1,327 games, scored 19,419 points and won the Sixth Man of the Year award three times. It was not the Cavs’ shining moment.
One of the definitional teams of the 1990s was the New York Knicks, a defensive juggernaut with Patrick Ewing in the middle. They made it to two NBA Finals and were a brick wall in the path of Eastern Conference contenders for the entire decade. Key to their identity was Charles Oakley.
The bruising power forward was the enforcer on those teams, playing a relatively small role on offense and knocking opponents around as a rebounder and interior defender. He was an underrated passer as well, and rightfully earned an All-Star berth in 1994.
Way back before he was thumping heads for the Knicks, Oakley was drafted ninth overall in the 1985 Draft by none other than the Cleveland Cavaliers. The first half of the 1980s were a dark time for the Cavs with owner Ted Stepien trading away pick after pick, and even when Stepien was gone and the Cavs had the chance to use their own first-round pick they traded it after the draft anyway.
Oakley was sent to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for Keith Lee (the 11th pick) and young point guard Ennis Whatley. The pair were out of the league in just a few seasons, while Oakley went on to play 19 seasons.
The final entry on our list is by far the highest pick, one of the few first-overall picks to be traded away after he was drafted but before he played a minute for his team. After taking the Kansas wing first in the 2014 NBA Draft, the Cleveland Cavaliers learned LeBron James was coming to town and pivoted into “win-now” mode, moving Wiggins as the centerpiece of a package for Minnesota big man Kevin Love.
Wiggins had a prolific start to his career, followed by a rocky patch as he struggled to be a high-scoring offensive option on a winning team. When the Jimmy Butler experiment fell apart, the Wolves were open to moving Wiggins and did so, sending him to the Golden State Warriors. With the Warriors Wiggins blossomed in a role perfectly designed for him, and he made an All-Star team and was a key part of their championship team in 2022.
The Cavs likely don’t regret the trade that they made, with Love serving an important role on the team over the next few seasons as they made the NBA Finals four years in a row. Even so, it is a bittersweet fact that the Cavs had the first overall pick three times in four seasons and essentially only got six seasons of Kyrie Irving from them.
Andrew Wiggins, Charles Oakley and Jamal Crawford highlight the list of players who passed through the Cleveland Cavaliers without ever making it their home.