Big trades in the NBA generate a lot of noise. Twitter blows up, analyses roll in and the basketball world seems to shift beneath our feet.
Any trade involving names of even marginal consequence feels significant, and a three-team deal like Monday night’s – which sent Dion Waiters to Oklahoma City, JR Smith and Iman Shumpert to Cleveland and some stuff the way of sad, sad New York – has an especially explosive feel.
But with the dust settled, was this trade actually that monumental?
It’s bold, no doubt, on the part of at least the Cavs and Thunder. Cleveland have now taken the last two top overall picks in the draft and Waiters, No 4 in 2012, and turned them into Kevin Love, Shumpert and Smith.
While Cleveland used their latter two picks to land a genuine superstar in Love (even if he hasn’t played like one for the Cavs yet), this trade of Waiters feels more like cutting bait.
As the AP writer Tom Withers noted in his lead to the trade news, “The Cavaliers tried to make it work with Dion Waiters. They couldn’t wait any longer.”
Waiters is a talented scorer, but right now it’s of the volume variety that’s largely empty, like Monta Ellis at his ebb in Golden State or, well, JR Smith right now.
Waiters has probably been a net negative early in his third season. The Cavs have scored 4.5 less points per 100 possessions (101) with him on the court than their overall rate (105.5), though defensively he’s surprisingly neutral (105.4/100 allowed without Waiters, 105.7/100 with).
That’ll happen when you shoot 40.4 per cent with a 24.1 usage rate. The Cavaliers didn’t bring LeBron and Love together to sit through those kinds of growing pains.
It’s probably not all his fault, as he’s played a lot of minutes with the likes of Matthew Dellavedova and Joe Harris and Mike Miller and the rest of Cleveland’s filler. He’s been tasked with carrying the scoring burden for a few iffy five-man units in Cleveland, and I think that’s impacted his productivity some.
Turning one body into two bodies will help Cleveland with their depth issues.
In Smith, Cleveland get a pretty similar player to Waiters, actually. Scores points, mostly neutral defender when he cares. And they add Shumpert to the mix, a wing with a good defensive reputation and a reasonable three-point shot.
Shumpert, in particular, could be a nice boost for a team that never could quite fit Waiters into the starting line-up with LeBron, Love, Kyrie Irving and Anderson Varejao (and now, Tristan Thompson).
He’s long and quick and can defend the wings, while on offence spotting up for three with defences more focused on LeBron, Love and Irving.
It’s no guarantee his production will see an uptick in Cleveland, but the uneven Shumpert that’s mostly showed up for the Knicks this season is a guy you can give minutes to all the same. Smith, too, hasn’t lit the world on fire, but he might find the environs in Cleveland more hospitable and, if not, the current Smith is someone you can still give minutes to.
New York, bad as they are, were at least slightly better than their -9.1 net points per 100 posessions with Shumpert (-8.1) and Smith (-7.8) on the floor.
Scored a bit more points with Smith (102.0 per 100 vs 98.2 without him) while giving up a couple points more defensively (109.8 with, 108.1 without). With Shumpert, they scored slightly more with him (100.2/100) and allowed less with him (108.2) than without him (108.9)
That gives the Cavaliers one more guy now than they had last week who can reliably fill a role and not kill you. Both Smith and Shumpert are probably an upgrade over this year’s Waiters.
That’s not a reason to start planning a championship parade in Cleveland, but it makes them marginally better, and they neeed every bit of depth they can get their hands on.
For the Thunder, it’s largely a flier on Waiters. The pick they sent to the Cavs is likely to fall somewhere in the 20s, and that’s not a bad play to take on Waiters’ upside.
I still think there’s something there with Waiters. His three-point shot has been bizarrely horrendous this year, and there’s no reason to think he’s truly that bad from distance.
When he bothers to move off the ball, he can be quick and crafty and in isolation he has the ability to knife toward the rim (he’s taking a career-high 54.1 per cent of his shots right at the bucket this season).
He posted a respectable enough 14.0 PER last year at 22, and 13.7 the year before that. Most of the stuff about his game – decent assist rate, fairly low turnover percentage, okay two-point field goal percentage, acceptable three-point attempt rate if he’s hitting closer to career norms – are right in line with what he’s consistently been in the NBA so far. Waiters isn’t doing a whole lot different this season.
His 12.1 PER downturn this year can largely be traced to his disastrous three-point shooting, which has to be in some part an anomaly, and a nose-diving free throw rate. He got to the line .248 times for every field goal attempt his first two seasons, and he shot 34.2 per cent from three. This year he’s getting to the line at a .175 rate and shooting a horrible 25.6 per cent from three.
Those two factors will simply make you a much, much less efficient and effective offensive contributor.
It obviously wasn’t working for the 23-year-old in Cleveland, but there are skills there Oklahoma City might be able to work with. There’s a little something about his game that reminds me of Jamal Crawford, but Crawford also didn’t figure out how to really thrive as a volume-scoring sixth man until his 30s.
So while I like Waiters and parts of his game, it wasn’t going to come together with the Cavs. It may not come together with the Thunder either. Dion Waiters right now is, simply, a very long-term proposition, and the Cavaliers are a short-term team, so I understand that move.
That’s where we arrive with this trade. Cleveland get a couple bodies who are marginally more useful than Waiters right now – one, Shumpert, that’s still young enough to have some upside himself and may genuinely thrive in that system.
The Thunder get a flier on an interesting talent who’s admittedly got regressing issues this year to sort out and a weird attitude generally, which might be a long-term roadblock to his figuring out how to fill a role and help a team.
The Knicks get salary relief and a future second-round toss of the dice with Cleveland’s pick.
Nothing earth-shattering in that. Some moving parts, some noticeable names, a lot of noise and something fun for everyone to poke and prod at for a few days.
But mostly it’s just the Cavaliers collecting bodies and the Thunder hoarding talent.
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