Cleveland Cavaliers pick 5th in what’s viewed as two-man draft

The Cleveland Cavaliers own the fifth pick in the NBA Draft, unfortunately, the talent pool thins considerably when the Cavs go on the clock.

The moment fans of the Cleveland Cavaliers waited eight months for came and died when the lottery revealed the Wine & Gold would pick fifth in the NBA Draft.

The revelation couldn’t have been more disastrous because the 2019 class of NBA freshman looks, right now, like one of the weakest recent memory.

Some view the draft as going three players deep, with Zion Williamson going first and Ja Morant and RJ Barrett filling out the second and third spots, interchangeably.

ESPN’s Brian Windhorst’s recent appearance on TheLandonDemand.com May 13 should make the Cavaliers feels worse (15:40, subscription).

The Akron native talked about how, through the information he’s gathered, that the draft is shaping up to be a two-man draft, with Morant going as the No. 2 pick.

“The thing about it is, it’s a bad year The draft guys I talk to say this is a two-player draft, that it’s Zion and Ja and the guys behind them all have various levels of flaws….There’s not a lot of excitement about guys like Cam Reddish and RJ Barrett to be instant game changers the way Zion could be.”

With this in mind, one of the biggest winners of the draft are the Memphis Grizzles.

According to Windy, the Grizzlies, who had the eighth best odds to win the lottery, were actively rooting to drop. To sum it up, they didn’t want to pick eighth. the Grizzlies wanted to turn the pick over to the Celtics to complete the 2015 trade for Jeff Green. But that would only happen if the pick had fallen out of the top eight.

They basically wanted a top three pick, or nine and below, and nothing to do with picks four through eight.

"“The Memphis Grizzlies are rooting to drop in this draft. They keep their pick if it stays where it’s at. If they drop, their pick gets sent to Boston…The reason they want it to go to Boston now is that they believe the eighth or ninth pick in this year’s draft…they believe being seventh, eighth or ninth is way better in next year’s draft…”"

I bring this up to show how the talent pool is being viewed around the league and just what a tough spot the Cavs find themselves in entering pre-draft workouts.

There’s always a caveat, of course. Nobody had ever heard of Giannis Antetokounmpo when his name was called with the 15th pick in the 2015 draft. Anthony Bennett had already put his Cavs’ hat on 14 picks earlier (ugh).

Donovan Mitchell is another recent example of a player getting draft well after the first pick to change the course of an NBA franchise.

It’s not impossible to find these players, granted, it gets a lot harder.