The Cleveland Cavaliers have seemingly exhausted all available outlets for making a move, as they spent Wednesday night finalizing a move for former Denver Nuggets forward Peyton Watson. In making this trade, the Cavs have assembled a starting lineup that is, quite simply, large.
While the Indiana Pacers are certainly not undersized, Cleveland has suddenly gone from being looked down at to being a potentially difficult matchup.
The Peyton Watson fit for the Cavs is certainly not ideal. It's an aggressive move for a team with improvement options few and far between. However, Cleveland now has two forwards that can handle Pascal Siakam well, a center that can handle Ivica Zubac's blend of physicality and touch comfortably, and a guard pairing that NBA Jam would've loved.
Just a few months after fans called this era of Cavaliers basketball dead, they've quietly flipped Caris Levert into Deandre Hunter into Dennis Schroder into the space to make this Watson move. They now have Evan Mobley and Watson as a pairing of rangy, lengthy wings who can do a ton of things.
Now, are there shooting and playmaking voids left behind by the loss of Max Strus and the over-reliance on Donovan Mitchell and James Harden? Absolutely! But the Cavs have built a new identity nearly overnight.
They will be big. They will attack closeouts. They will defend the weak side of the rim as if it were a leak in their submarine.
Experimentation can change things so rapidly, and while the Pacers' strength lies in their formula and, as such, their predictability, the Cavs exist to put a sudden wrench in the plans of a team that thought they would waltz into a top three seed in the now-loaded Eastern Conference.
Pacers have eaten their lotus flowers
If anyone has seen the Odyssey, whether they read the Homeric epic or watched the Nolan blockbuster, they would know of the eating of the lotus flowers. Within that story, the lotuses function as a perpetual state of complacency, in which Odysseus does not think to journey back to his home of Ithaca, only to calmly exist on the shores of an island he cannot remember arriving at.
Oddly, the Pacers are in a similar boat.
Indiana is not a bad enough team that they will spend years in purgatory, especially not after cashing in their gap-year prize with their new Croatian center. And their offseason was not a case of complacency as much as it was trust. However, there is some truth to the simple nature of their lineup.
The Pacers have a team that still abides by the common knowledge of positional basketball. They have an orchestrator playing point guard, a pure scorer playing shooting guard, a low-usage three-and-D forward on the wing, a versatile do-it-all four, and a burly, imposing center who sets screens, rebounds, and works out of the post.
The Cavs have a shooting guard playing point guard, a brick wall in a 6'2 body shooting everything he can, a power forward playing the three, a defensive octopus at the four, and an admittedly very standard center.
Indiana's roster is better on paper because it makes the most sense. The issue is that sense is not what usually defines championship teams.
It's the ability to do something no one else can. And the Pacers lack that entirely.
Add us as a preferred source on Google