The Cleveland Cavaliers are a team where players come and take the next step in their careers.
Jarrett Allen has leveled up since arriving on the team, improving steadily each year as a two-way force. Caris LeVert, his former Brooklyn teammate, has gone from a player with a very narrow skillset to a versatile do-it-all wing who is shooting the lights out and playing above-average perimeter defense.
Ty Jerome is having a career season. Sam Merrill has gone from G League gunner to in the rotation for a title contender. Georges Niang is playing extremely well. The Cleveland organization deserves a lot of credit for how they have signed or traded for players and given them the tools and the environment to excel.
At the same time, not every player has seen their best basketball come during their time playing for the wine-and-gold. Some players have blossomed after they left town, with a change of scenery setting them up to excel. Let's look at three such players, including one the Cavaliers just had to face in the game of the year last week.
No. 3: Jordan Clarkson
The 2017-18 Cleveland Cavaliers overhauled their entire roster around LeBron James in the middle of the season, and in doing so set the team up to reach the NBA Finals for the fourth-straight year. Then James left, and the team that was left took a few years to make their way to new homes.
Jordan Clarkson was one such player, who started his career with the Los Angeles Lakers and was traded alongside Larry Nance Jr. to Cleveland in 2018. He spent roughly two years with the Cavaliers, averaging 15.5 points per game in 138 appearances, before the Utah Jazz targeted him in a trade.
Clarkson found his footing with the Jazz, settling in as a high-volume scoring threat off the bench. He won Sixth Man of the Year in 2020-21 and was a part of some wildly successful regular season teams in Utah, thriving alongside Donovan Mitchell and company.
For now the 32-year-old Clarkson is still in Utah as they process through their rebuild, but a team looking for some punch off the bench may target him in a trade this year.
No. 2: Lauri Markkanen
More recently and more famously than Jordan Clarkson's salt-lake glow-up has been the ascension of Lauri Markkanen into an All-Star after leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers. The seven-foot stretch big, as he was known in Chicago during his rookie contract, began to expand his game playing small forward for the Cavaliers in his one season in town. Yet the lack of spacing around him and the presence of other high-level shot creators meant there was not, and likely never would be, the room for him to stretch his wings.
That made it a win-win for the Cavs to include him in the trade for Donovan Mitchell. Suddenly Markkanen was the focal point of the offense with an offensively-gifted head coach putting him in places to succeed. Markkanen leveled up, making his first All-Star Game and winning Most Improved Player.
Markkanen is toiling away on a bad Utah Jazz team, and his numbers have slipped this year as he plays the vast majority of his minutes with teenagers and raw prospects. Once Utah finds its footing and surrounds him with a real NBA team, it's likely that he returns once more to All-Star form.
No. 1: Isaiah Hartenstein
In early 2021 during the condensed post-pandemic season, the Denver Nuggets wanted an upgrade at backup center. They traded a couple of second-round picks to the Cleveland Cavaliers for JaVale McGee, who at the least had a handful of championship rings on his fingers. In return, the Nuggets sent a young German center named Isaiah Hartenstein back to the Cavaliers.
Hartenstein's per-minute numbers in his 16 games with the Cavaliers that season were excellent: 16.6 points, 12 rebounds and five assists. Yet at the end of the year, a Cleveland team that was rebuilding and about to draft Evan Mobley decided not to invest any resources in another center (Jarrett Allen was entrenched as the starter) and Hartenstein signed a small deal with the LA Clippers.
He there began to level up, to the point that the New York Knicks were happy to give him a two-year deal for real money the next offseason. It was in New York that Hartenstein truly blossomed, first backing up Mitchell Robinson and then ascending into the starting role. His rim protection, passing ability, rebounding strength and soft touch all earned him a massive deal from the Oklahoma City Thunder this summer.
After he was once a throw-in on a trade for a backup center, Hartenstein is an All-Defense candidate this season and starting for one of the two best teams in basketball. He is the prime example of a player who took his career to the next level after leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers.