This past week the Cleveland Cavaliers signed a player to fill their 15th and final roster spot.
They have tried out a few players in that spot this season but overall have played with a 14-man roster. It hasn't hurt them in any meaningful way; on the contrary, they are 62-15 with one of the best benches in the league. When 13 of your 14 players are worthy of NBA rotation minutes, you don't exactly need the 15th.
Yet with the playoffs two weeks away, it was time to add that final player. There is no reason not to, and if a player is not on the full roster prior to the end of the season, they cannot step into a playoff game. Every team is going to head to war with a full roster.
The player that the Cavaliers chose was Chuma Okeke. It should have been a backup center, but as we detailed, there were none on the market worth signing; that was a mistake the team made at the Trade Deadline in not addressing that need. At that point, signing another forward like Okeke was a fine decision.
Yet Okeke himself is nothing to write home about; he was not an absolute steal the Cavaliers had to jump on. He played a couple of 10-day contracts with the moribund Philadelphia 76ers and was not brought back. If he was a home run swing waiting for some lucky NBA team, he would have been scooped up long before.
In signing Okeke, the Cavaliers added some level of depth at a valuable position, but one where they already had a lot of players. In the process, they signaled a massive vote of no confidence in a recent draft pick. Why didn't they sign Emoni Bates?
Emoni Bates is an NBA bust
In the age of the two-way contract, most teams use their final roster spot to elevate a player on a two-way contract to a standard contract. Doing so serves a few different purposes. First, as noted above, a player has to be on the 15-man roster to play in the playoffs. If a team has a player on a two-way deal who is capable of playing in the postseason, they will transfer that player over to the main roster.
Secondly, it locks a player up long-term. Two-way deals are limited in their length, while a standard contract can go out for four seasons. Especially for an expensive team like the Cavaliers, converting a two-way player can lock in a young player at a low, cost-controlled amount for multiple seasons. If there were anyone worthy of such a move, the Cavs would almost certainly have made it.
Instead, the Cavaliers signed a ho-hum forward who can't shoot and has already washed out in multiple stops. They looked at their current group of two-way players and concluded they were not ready to contribute and not worth protecting with a long-term deal.
That means Cleveland is not worried about another team swooping in and signing their players away -- especially since they will have little recourse as an expensive team flirting with the second tax apron. They are familiar with the move; the Cavaliers did that to Ty Jerome two summers ago, signing him off of a two-way deal at just enough to make it impossible for the Golden State Warriors to match. Most teams in the league could do that to Cleveland this summer with Emoni Bates.
Why aren't the Cavs concerned about such a move? It's because Bates has shown no sign that he is an NBA player despite his incredible high school pedigree. After reclassifying to enter college early, Bates was a bust at Memphis as a freshman, then put up an inefficient and not-convincing season at Eastern Michigan. Fans got extremely excited when the team drafted him in the second round of the 2023 NBA Draft.
Since then, Bates has shown that he can shoot a high volume of 3-point shots, and they go in at a decent rate.
That's it. That's the list of NBA skills, the entirety of the "strengths" column when it comes to a player who once looked like a surefire Top-5 pick. He remains slight and is knocked around anytime he ventures into the paint. He is a turnstile on defense, averages more turnovers than assists in the G League and is playing basketball like the "shoot" button is being held down at all times.
Bates wasn't worthy of an NBA contract. He isn't a threat to be snatched by another team. Barring a truly unexpected transformation, he will likely be cut by the Cavaliers in the near future -- this summer perhaps. Whatever promise he once showed has dissipated into the atmosphere.
Signing Chuma Okeke was a shoulder-shrug of a move for the Cavaliers. What is far more interesting than whether Okeke will ever see a non-garbage-time minutes in the playoffs is what it means for Emoni Bates, another failed draft pick and one of the most glaring falls from grace for a No. 1 high school player in years.
Perhaps he can find redemption on his basketball journey. Increasingly, however, it doesn't look like that chance will come in Cleveland.