Yeah, this is not seeing the big picture at all. Koby needed to get a trade package that included : A). Players that fit that current timeline with Love + LBJ. B.) Included young players and assets to prepare for a possible future without Lebron.
Boston gave us IT who bare minimum was a reclamation project who can score. Jae Crowder was excellent defender in Boston and could hold his own on offense. Lue did nothing to integrate them into the offense and neither guy performed up to their ability.
Those guys, Zizic, and the Nets pick were a good haul for a guy threatening to sit out the season. The execution by Lue was horrible, the org. mishandling Zizic, and the Nets performing above expectation are the things that made this a bad deal.
Do you remember the alternative deals that were leaked to the media? I could understand picking up Middleton, but that doesn't return any picks or assets to the team. Jackson from Phoenix had potential back then but that did little to help the Cavs in contending for a title. The only other deal that made sense was the one for Paul George that DG vetoed.
So if it was that easy that any poster on the board could have done better, who would you get in return for Kyrie?
This is 110% wrong. We now have two years to fully evaluate the Kyrie trade and it was possibly one of the worst trades in NBA history, flat out. After seeing the results I am astounded that anyone would defend it. You can't fool me about this, I actually watched the Cleveland Cavaliers and all the players involved during the 2017-18 season.
It is not me who is missing the big picture, it's you. The "big picture" here is that the 2017-2018 season was one of the most important years in Cavaliers history. Our only chance to keep Lebron was by performing well and giving him a good supporting cast to work with, so he could be reassured that the rest of his career wouldn't be spent dragging awful Cleveland teams and a dysfunctional Cavaliers front office through increasingly difficult playoff challenges. If we *didn't* keep Lebron then the 2017-18 season was our last chance to win a championship for who knows how long. Either way, it was a critical season. And we kicked it off by trading our best trade asset, an all-star player at the peak of his reputation, for a steaming pile of garbage. Players that were awful on the court and awful in the locker room.
We got terrible players. You must be the last person on any NBA board anywhere who is defending IT. Not even Wizards fans do this. IT wasn't a "reclamation project who could score". Was he reclaimed? By the Cavs or the Lakers, Nuggets, or Wizards? No. Did he score? No. Did he defend? Not even you can say anything about that. Did he act like a dysfunctional midget clown in the locker room? Well, yes he did do that. I'm sorry for IT because Boston really screwed him, but fact is he was a dysfunctional cripple who Danny Ainge passed off on our naive, incompetent GM as the centerpiece of a trade for an all-star. As for Jae Crowder, he is a somewhat competent role player who a good coach can make something of in just the right situation, no more than that.
The ONLY argument for what we got in return in that trade is that the Nets pick was a wild roll of the dice on just maybe getting Luka Doncic, like a one in twenty chance we would get lucky. Of course, we didn't get lucky, and trading your best asset in your most critical year for a low-odds roll of the dice is a bad idea.
You do the thing that defenders of this horrible, pathetic trade constantly do, which is whine "well what else could we have gotten it's just so haaaard to trade a young talented all-star in the NBA for anything but a pile of trash...". Ridiculous. We had posters on this very board who defended the trade tell us that we had a trade for Brogdon and Middleton on the table for Kyrie. That would have been a FANTASTIC trade that could have made us competitive in the 2017-18 Finals and possibly even have gotten Lebron to stay.
And Brogdon and Middleton is just the beginning. You know who got trade just a few weeks before Kyrie? Chris Paul. If we hadn't been so mired in front office dysfunction do you think we might have been aware enough to realize that was a possibility. Do you think we could have put up more of a fight against the Warriors in the 2018 Finals with CP3 and Lebron teamed up? Do you think Lebron might have considered staying to play with one of his best friends? You know who got traded just a few months after the Kyrie trade? Blake Griffin, Tobias Harris/Avery Bradley. You think that we could have been more competitive with some of them?
Now no doubt you are going to say those trades "wouldn't have returned assets" to the team, because they just involved great players who in some cases had options for free agency. WELL WE DIDN'T GET ANY FUCKING ASSETS OUT OF THE KYRIE TRADE EITHER, THAT'S THE WHOLE GODDAMN POINT. And again, you are totally missing the big picture about what the 2017-18 season was all about. It was OUR LAST CHANCE to keep Lebron and OUR LAST CHANCE to win a championship for at least a decade. That's not a year where you take shaky gambles on "assets" that don't pan out. That's a year when you go for broke to put the best possible product on the court and see where it takes you. Years like that come along very rarely. And we started the year by totally fucking things up.
