The Cavaliers' roster is currently in a little bit of a predicament. Between the emergence of Larry Nance Jr and the trade for Jarrett Allen, the frontcourt that the Cavs took into the season of Kevin Love and Andre Drummond appears to no longer be in the plan going forward and will probably become a hindrance before the season even ends.
Currently, the frontcourt in Cleveland consists of Larry Nance, Kevin Love, sometimes Taurean Prince, Jarrett Allen, Andre Drummond, and Javale McGee. That's way too many players and not enough minutes. There's only 96 available minutes per game at the power forward and center positions, and there's no way to cram all 6 players into those minutes and also maximize their utility.
Ideally, Jarrett Allen plays around 30-32 mpg, leaving 16-18 minutes left at the center position. Nance so far is averaging 36 mpg but it would be better if that was lowered to around 33-34 mpg. That leaves 14-15 mpg left at power forward. I would prefer to fill those minutes with Taurean Prince, considering the small forward minutes are also crowded and there's going to be overflow.
What that leaves you with is no minutes available for Kevin Love, and 16-18 available center minutes with Andre Drummond and Javale McGee as 2nd and 3rd on the center depth chart. So, the goal is to turn these 3 players into salary relief, picks if possible, and someone that can give you 16-18 quality center minutes.
Kevin Love is a very weird asset and likely doesn't have very many realistic trade destinations. The only one I found that made sense was San Antonio, and even then it involves a special scenario and some convincing. Love to the Spurs is something I've already covered, and this trade will follow along the same premise. The reason the Spurs trading for Love theoretically makes sense is to give Coach Pop another good player to try to win as many games as possible before he retires. The Spurs front office will likely put off a rebuild until Pop retires, so as long as he's here, they'll try to win.
I've suggested a 3 team trade before that sends Love to San Antonio, pictured here:
That trade is still plan A for a Love trade, however there are more options for the trade than just this. The Celtics have a $28.5 million trade exception, meaning they can add a player with a salary that doesn't exceed that number, and can do so without having to send back matching salaries. They can essentially absorb a player's contract into that exception. The reason they'd want to do this is that they're kind of in need of a power forward and Rudy Gay could possibly fill that for them. Gay probably wasn't going to play in Cleveland anyways, so if you can get anything back from Boston for him it would be a plus.
The Knicks also have the ability to absorb fairly large contracts, but for a different reason. Currently they're significantly under the salary cap, sitting at $19 million below, which is something you don't really see nowadays. The reason I bring them up is that they might have interest in Patty Mills. Right now, the Knicks have a lot of point guards, but to be honest, none of them are actually good. They have Elfrid Payton, Immanuel Quickley, Dennis Smith Jr, and Frank Ntilikina. Quickly has shown promise and Payton gets the majority of the playing time, but I really don't think any of these guys contribute to winning as much as Patty Mills right now. After being bad for so long and this year finally having a chance to put a competitive team on the floor, the Knicks might want to jump on this opportunity and try to win. They could absorb Mills' $13.3 million contract, but Mills has been so good that they might have to give up assets in return. Either the Mavs' or the Clippers' 2021 firsts should do the trick and would go to San Antonio. Also the Grizzlies got Ja Morant back since I proposed the trade so they probably won't feel like they need to go out and get another point guard.
Moving on to a completely separate trade, Andre Drummond could be headed elsewhere, and the two places it makes the most sense for him to go is to either Dallas or Charlotte. I tried to make the Charlotte trade happen, but they simply didn't have the matching salaries since they cut Nic Batum. Dallas, however, has the pieces to make a trade happen. The trade, in its most basic form, would look something like this:
To put all these moves together is too many teams for any trade machine I've used to handle, so I'm going to have to do this the old fashioned way. I'm also assuming the Celtics take Gay, the Knicks take Mills in exchange for the Clippers' 2021 first, Powell goes to the Grizzlies, and the McGee/Monk swap is a separate trade.
- Cavs trade Kevin Love and Andre Drummond, receive Gorgui Dieng and James Johnson
- Knicks trade the Clippers' 2021 first round pick, receive Patty Mills
- Spurs trade Patty Mills and Rudy Gay, receive Kevin Love and the Clippers' 2021 pick
- Grizzlies trade Gorgui Dieng, receive Dwight Powell
- Mavs trade Dwight Powell and James Johnson, receive Andre Drummond
- Celtics receive Rudy Gay
- Cavs trade Javale McGee, receive Malik Monk
- Hornets trade Malik Monk, receive Javale McGee
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