Alan Frankel
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

Who Won The Kyrie Irving trade?

Hint: It wasn't the Cavs

After listening to the BS Pod and reading numerous other takes on this trade, its pretty clear that the Cavaliers got completely ripped off in this deal. The Cavs gave away an almost guaranteed trip to the finals this year and 3 years of watching Kyrie Irving’s nightly virtuoso act for one season of Isaiah Thomas,Jae Crowder and next years number 4–9 pick. Sorry Cavs fans (myself included) that Nets pick is not going to be Marvin Bagley or some other future phenom. It will be an “asset” that will be worthless once Lebron leaves next summer.

This deal makes no sense for the Cavs if you even glance at their future. With a healthy Kyrie Irving, the Cavs would have blown through he Eastern Conference playoffs again and either faced A) a healthy Golden State B)an injured Golden State C)Rockets/Spurs/Thunder. in two of the three scenarios the Cavs would be favored to win the Finals and the third would have been amazing to watch. Instead, they will now have to go against Irving and Gordon Hayward, potentially with home court advantage in Boston.

Looking forward for the Cavaliers, if Lebron leaves this summer, at least we would still have watchable basketball with Kyrie, Kevin Love, and max cap space to build around. That would be a playoff caliber team, maybe even an outside shot at at a conference finals if we made the right moves with the cap space and Lebron went west.

Now the 2019 Cavs are going to have a projected started lineup of Kevin Love and a bunch of trash. Which means the Cavs will probably move Love and rebuild. Unfortunately for the Cavs, the gap between smart management and poor management is growing in the NBA and I would bet that the Celtics will be very competitive for as long as Ainge is calling the shots and that the Cavs sans- Lebron will not be very competitive with Dan Gilbert calling the shots. Does anyone else remember the Lucious Harris, Darius Miles, Zydrunas Ilgauskas era? It wasn't fun. This front office hasn’t made a decent decision personnel wise in decades if you remove the David Griffin Era.

Their are only two ways to realistically view this move from the Cavs point of view. The first is that this was a move to cut costs once Lebron leaves. Gilbert does not want to be paying Kyrie for years without Lebron. The Brooklyn pick was the ideal crowd- pleaser it makes the fans think the Cavs are building towards the future, even though the front office has a horrible draft track record when their not drafting slam dunks picks.

The second (which I hope is true)option is that they are planning to move Kevin Love the Brooklyn pick and Jae Crowder for Boogie Cousins or some other trade is in the works.

At any rate the Celtics won this trade by a landslide. They got their future point guard who has major crunch time chops to play with a loaded roster in a weak conference and weakened their strongest opposition all in one move. For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot of positives in one sentence for the Celtics and a whole page of negatives for the Cavs.

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Alan Frankel

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I like life. And Football. And Basketball.

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