The Cleveland Cavaliers extract a king’s ransom for Kyrie Irving

By K.M. | NEW YORK

“IF IT ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the old adage goes. And the Cleveland Cavaliers of North America’s National Basketball Association (NBA) are very, very far from broken: they have reached the finals for three consecutive years, and in 2016 won the first championship for a major professional sports team in the city in over half a century. Nonetheless, on August 22nd Koby Altman, who was named the club’s general manager less than a month earlier, took the bold step of breaking up the Cavaliers’ core, by trading Kyrie Irving (pictured, left), their star point guard, to the Boston Celtics. In exchange, Mr Altman received a package of three players headlined by Isaiah Thomas (right), plus a pick in the 2018 entry draft. In a superstar-driven sport like basketball, the team that receives the best player in a deal usually wins it. The Cavaliers-Celtics swap is unlikely to be an exception. But there is a strong argument that it was Cleveland, not Boston, who wound up with the top player in the transaction—and that the prize of what will be forever remembered as the Irving-Thomas deal is neither named Irving nor Thomas.

Mr Altman did not assume the reins with a mandate to tear down and rebuild the team he inherited. However, Mr Irving forced the Cavaliers’ hand in early July, by making an unexpected demand for a trade. Rumours had swirled for some time that the electric guard was tiring of playing second fiddle to LeBron James, statistically the greatest player in modern NBA history, who grew up in nearby Akron and has spent ten of his 14 NBA seasons with the club. Moreover, Mr James will become a free agent after next season, and has provided no assurances that he plans to re-sign with Cleveland. If he departs and Mr Irving becomes the Cavaliers’ best player, there is no guarantee the club would be able to surround Mr Irving with enough talent to contend for a title. By asking to be dealt now, Mr Irving maximised his chances of securing a place in the league’s pantheon of greats by becoming the pre-eminent star on a championship team.

Mr Irving’s request put Mr Altman in a bind. Although he was under no legal obligation to deal his point guard, continuing to employ a player who had asked to ply his trade elsewhere could have a toxic effect on morale. Moreover, in the past, NBA stars unhappy with their surroundings have been known to play at less than maximum effort in order to force a change of scenery—and, on occasion, to admit it once a trade was consummated. By allowing his demand to become public, Mr Irving sharply reduced the Cavaliers’ leverage in any trade negotiation.

Nonetheless, Mr Irving is such a prominent star that virtually every club in the league had some interest in acquiring him. Mr Altman only needed to find one willing to pay full freight, and that team turned out to be the Boston Celtics. Last year Boston actually bested the Cavaliers for the best regular-season record in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. When the two clubs met in the playoffs, however, Mr James and Mr Irving eviscerated the Celtics: Cleveland won the series four games to one, outscoring Boston by a massive average of 20 points per game. The Cavaliers also swept the Celtics in a first-round series in 2015. The general consensus among NBA analysts was that although Boston had a deep, versatile roster well-suited to surviving the grind of the 82-game regular season, the Celtics lacked the front-line star power to go deep into the playoffs, when teams play at maximum effort in every game. And when Mr Irving put himself on the trading block, Boston gained the opportunity not only to enlist such a player, but also to remove him from the Cavaliers, their closest rivals in the East.

The price tag, however, would be astronomical. On the surface, the centrepiece of the haul Cleveland received for Mr Irving was Mr Thomas, who is about as close to a statistical clone of Mr Irving as one can get. Both are point guards who are gifted passers when they happen to feel generous, but whose primary instinct is to shoot early and shoot often. Mr Thomas actually outscored Mr Irving last year, with 28.9 points per game to Mr Irving’s 25.2—although Mr Irving’s output was limited by having to share the ball with Mr James, whereas Mr Thomas was Boston’s unquestioned first scoring option. Both players combine expert marksmanship from long range with quickness, agility and ball-handling that enables them to drive to the basket and finish over far taller players (though Mr Thomas does depend occasionally on teammates to feed him the ball in favourable spots on the court, whereas Mr Irving can disrupt defences and create his own shot as well as anyone in the NBA). And both guards are dire defensive liabilities, improving opposing teams’ scoring nearly as much as they do their own. According to Real Plus-Minus (RPM), a statistic that measures a player’s impact by comparing his team’s scoring margin when he is on and off the court, both Mr Irving and Mr Thomas add 4-6 points per 100 possessions to their own teams’ ledgers and 2-4 to those of their opponents. In sum, they are both around two points per game better than an average NBA player.

So why were the Celtics willing to pile on so much on top of Mr Thomas just to land his statistical doppelganger? The answer is probably a combination of effort and potential. It is a minor miracle that Mr Thomas even has a job in the NBA: at 5’9” (1.75 metres), he is one of the 25 shortest players in the league’s history, and of players that height, only Calvin Murphy approached Mr Thomas’s value. It is a testament to Mr Thomas’s skill and athleticism that he has become such a formidable offensive threat despite his stature. On the other end of the court, however, there is nothing Mr Thomas can do to stop opposing guards from simply shooting over him with abandon.

Mr Irving, in contrast, stands 6’3”, the prototypical size for a point guard, and possesses the quickness, hands and footwork to be a capable defender. If he were to put in the effort, there is no reason he could not put up a credible showing on defence. And in fact, there is strong evidence that Mr Irving is actually a perfectly acceptable defender, who simply chooses to slack off strategically save his energy on that end of the floor during the low-stakes games of the regular season. According to Box Plus/Minus, a well-regarded measure of a player’s impact in each half of the game, his defensive contributions in the playoffs, when every game really counts, have been roughly league-average, whereas the same metric for his regular-season games is abysmal. The playoff version of Mr Irving—solid on defence and stunning on offence—is a true star, precisely what the Celtics need to take the next step and make their first finals since 2008. (Mr Thomas’s defence in the post-season has been just as poor as it is in the regular season: apparently, you can’t make yourself taller, no matter how hard you try.) Moreover, Mr Thomas suffered a season-ending hip injury last year that could hamper his performance next season, is under contract for one fewer season than Mr Irving is and is three years older.

So Boston may have been well-advised to try to upgrade from Mr Thomas to Mr Irving. But the opportunity to pick up a couple of points per 100 possessions on defence in the playoffs came at a steep cost. Mr Altman is clearly familiar with the cutting edge of statistical analysis of basketball, as the primary player he got back alongside Mr Thomas was Jae Crowder, one of the players on whom opinion is most deeply divided between quantitatively-driven observers and traditional scouts.

On the surface, Mr Crowder’s numbers do not appear particularly impressive. During the past two seasons, he has averaged a pedestrian 14 points, 5.4 rebounds and two assists per game, while making 45% of his shots from the floor. However, his game is perfectly suited for the modern NBA. On offence, he takes over three-quarters of his shots either from close to the rim or beyond the three-point line—the two most valuable shot types in the sport. His rebounds well for a player of his height (6’6”), and rarely turns the ball over. And he is a strong defender, capable of shutting down rivals at multiple positions. Few archetypes of players are more coveted in today’s game than the “three-and-D wing”—a shooting guard or small forward who can shoot from long range and stifle the top scorers on opposing teams—and Mr Crowder is among the league’s finest in this genre. As a result, he finished 20th in the entire NBA last year in RPM, at nearly four points above average per 100 possessions—far better than either Mr Irving or Mr Thomas.

Even if you maintain a healthy scepticism of RPM, Mr Crowder should be a perfect fit for the Cavaliers. His greatest weakness is his inability to create his own shot, and in a starting lineup that already features Mr James, Mr Thomas and Kevin Love (who has twice finished in the NBA’s top five in scoring), the last thing Cleveland needs is another shooter. Just as Draymond Green complements the scorers on the Golden State Warriors, who have played the Cavaliers in three consecutive NBA finals, with his passing, rebounding and defence, so can Mr Crowder fill in the gaps in Mr Thomas’s and Mr Love’s games. But today, no one considers Mr Green a mere member of Golden State’s supporting cast: he is universally regarded as a star in his own right, despite his modest point totals. And according to RPM, Mr Crowder’s work on the Celtics last year was very similar to Mr Green’s in 2013-14, the year before the current edition of the Warriors won their first championship. Statistically-minded observers will not be surprised if Mr Crowder winds up receiving similar accolades.

If Mr Crowder proves to be anywhere near as valuable as RPM suggests, then the combination of him and Mr Thomas should far exceed Mr Irving’s output. But Mr Altman was able to extract even more from the Celtics: Cleveland also acquired a first-round pick in the NBA’s 2018 entry draft, one which Boston acquired from the Brooklyn Nets in 2013. Draft picks are among the most coveted assets in the league, since they provide the opportunity to acquire young, elite talent at collectively-bargained salaries far below market value. And since teams make their selections roughly in reverse order of their won-lost records the previous year—the top choices are allocated by lottery, but the worst clubs have the best odds of winning them—draft picks from losing teams are particularly precious. Last year, the Nets had the worst record in the entire NBA, and oddsmakers project them to repeat that dubious feat next season. If Brooklyn performs as badly as expected, the Cavaliers will stand an excellent chance of securing a top-three selection in what is expected to be a strong draft class. That would give Cleveland the opportunity to acquire a new franchise player, which both might help entice Mr James to re-sign with the team, and give them a new cornerstone to build around if he does not.

Finally, the trade is a financial coup for the Cavaliers as well. According to CARM-ELO, a basketball projection system developed by the quantitative-analysis website FiveThirtyEight, Mr Irving and Mr Thomas are both likely to provide on-court contributions worth about $20m more than they will be paid during the remainder of their contracts. Mr Crowder, in contrast, has perhaps the most team-friendly contract in the entire NBA: he will earn just $22m over the next three seasons combined. That is fully $55m less than CARM-ELO’s estimate of his true value. Moreover, if the Nets’ pick winds up sitting near the top of the draft, it could net Cleveland another player whose on-court value could exceed his paychecks by up to $45m—as well as the opportunity to re-sign that player to a more generous deal than any rival club can once his contract expires.

The Cavaliers-Celtics swap should provide an excellent experiment to test the accuracy of RPM. Over 10,000 simulations of the 2017-18 season based largely on RPM, Cleveland’s roster before the trade projected to win an average of 56.2 games, whereas Boston was forecast for 55.5. Now that the deal has been consummated, the Cavaliers’ expected record (assuming Mr Thomas’s hip holds up) has improved to 60.2 regular-season wins—a better mark than their performance in any of the past three seasons. The Celtics’ has fallen to 50.6. Mr Irving may well turn out to be the star capable of dominating in the playoffs that Boston so sorely needs. Nonetheless, by trading for him, Boston may have inadvertently improved their playoff rivals’ chances of victory more than their own.