Cleveland Cavaliers: The Search For A Center
By Joshua Howe
I was writing a piece about LeBron James’ top five Christmas Day performances on Christmas Eve when news broke of Anderson Varejao’s season-ending injury. Late to the story, I had missed the general reaction of the public on Twitter when they had had their collective freak out.
I gave myself a few tweets to express my dismay and then, after banging my head against the wall for several minutes, decided to look towards the uncertain future of the Cleveland Cavaliers that has already spent most of the season in disarray.
The Cavs need a center. But not just any center, they need a center that can do something, anything on the defensive side of the ball.
We’ve now had a few games of the Varejao-less Cavs, and it’s been downright awful.
It started with the Christmas Day matchup between the Cavs and Heat (who were already locked and loaded to do everything in their power to win the game). Dwyane Wade looked as if this was the most important game of the last five years for him, dropping 24 points in the first half and making Kevin Love look like a slam dunk contest prop:
The Cavaliers couldn’t do a single thing to stop Miami from getting inside. The Heat outscored the Cavs 44-28 in the paint and 16-2 on second chance points.
Both Wade and Luol Deng bullied their way to the bucket on multiple occasions, never fearing Love or Tristan Thompson’s help defense (or lack thereof). Cleveland was helpless to stop their relentless attack, and this was without the presence of big man Chris Bosh, who sat out with an injury.
A second example came in the form of the Orlando Magic.
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Before the fourth quarter began, the Magic led the game 75-71. The Cavs were also without Kyrie Irving this time around, who sat out with a sore (bruised) knee.
Then two key things happened.
First, Tobias Harris made the mistake of talking trash to LeBron, who then lit him up for 15 points in the final period after his “chill mode was deactivated.”
Second, Blatt decided to sit Love and play the small ball game. This worked in the Cavs’ favour in a pretty glaring way, with the Magic shooting 57 percent with Love on the floor (70 percent in the paint) and just 35 percent with him on the bench.
Recently, stats like these have left a lot of Cavs fans in anti-Love mode. There have even been calls to trade the stretch-four.
This is all nonsense. The Cavs won’t and shouldn’t trade Love. He’s a key piece to the team as an extremely terrifying offensive threat.
However, this doesn’t mean he doesn’t need help defending on the inside and sadly, Thompson can’t do it alone. How many more games can the Cavs play the way they did against Orlando, in which they needed LeBron to break out of “chill mode” and managed to match up against the opponent well with a small lineup?
Not many.
So it’s time to locate a defensive center and quick, before this already flip-flopping Cavaliers season takes a turn for the worse.
As for the free agent options, there aren’t many encouraging players.
Emeka Okafor and Jermaine O’Neal are two that are still around. Both Okafor (neck) and O’Neal (sprained knee) are returning from injuries, with O’Neal’s perhaps being the less worrisome of the two.
Lots of teams will and have expressed interest in these two as quality backup centers. The Cavs will be no exception, though both players come with their respective baggage.
Okafor is only 32, but relies heavily on jumping ability, which he’s lost considerable amount of due to injuries over his career. He also hasn’t played since 2012-13.
O’Neal, on the other hand, is an injury prone 36-year-old, though he did manage to average 7.9 points per game, 5.5 rebounds per game and 20.1 minutes for the Golden State Warriors in the regular season before eventually getting hurt in last season’s playoffs.
Both of these options are risky, there’s no question about that. But the Cavs are beyond the point of fretting over taking risks. They’ll do anything they can to try and get someone who can help control things on the interior.
Yet, it must be running through LeBron’s mind more than anyone else’s that these things don’t always work out. He’s had his fair share of big men in the past who were supposed to help him win a championship, but failed to produce anything meaningful in their given role. The list ranges from the likes of Shaquille O’Neal back in 2009-10, to Greg Oden just last season.
If they can, they Cavs should try to do everything in their power to get younger, bouncier players. There are a few around the league that general manager David Griffin could make offers for. Some of them include:
The most interesting of these four has to be Wright, who was recently traded to Boston in the Rajon Rondo deal.
He is just 27 years old with a lot of juice left in him, as we saw when he was part of the league’s best offense in Dallas. He’s a good pick and roll player, and opponents only make 48.9 percent of their shots at the rim while he’s defending them.
Most importantly, he doesn’t need to score to be effective and is quite happy being a role player on a good team. He would be a great complement next to Love and could become the Cavaliers’ anchor given time.
The problem with any of these players, of course, lies in the trading process.
The Cavs are running out of assets, and that recent Varejao contract hurts a lot more now that he’s out for the rest of the season. Cleveland would need to give up Dion Waiters (really their only valuable player-trade-chip) and picks, some of which they’ve already dealt in previous trades.
In no way is any of this certain. Acquiring and even the performance of any of these centers is heavily reliant on chance. But the Cavaliers are past the point of worrying about maybes and what-ifs.
The sole certainty remains that without making any move, the Cavaliers won’t be making a trip to The Finals anytime soon.