Photo via marc falardeau on Flickr.
When the Cavs and Magic face off tonight, they will have a lot of things in common. Both teams have redefined or are in the process of redefining their identities following the loss of the best players in their respective histories. They’ve taken more or less the same approach to the rebuilding process, although the Cavs are two years further along and already have one player around whom to shape their roster. Neither team has much to play for at this point in the season beyond ping-pong balls, and both are in the business of developing the talents that may or may not be their future.
The Cavs and the Magic each began the season with one veteran player who is perennially underrated and is the type of talent that makes everyone say they’d “love to see him on a contender.” Both have been constantly on the trade block for the last several years, but were either too injured or too highly valued to be dealt. If Anderson Varejao was healthy, he would have likely headlined Thursday’s trading deadline along with J.J. Redick. Redick was shipped from the Magic to the Bucks for a pretty solid package of expiring money and young talent, probably similar to what Cleveland could have hoped for in return for Varejao. Tonight’s game will mark the debut of Doron Lamb, Tobias Harris, and Beno Udrih in Magic uniforms. It’ll take some time for them to get acclimated in Jacque Vaughn’s rotation. The Cavs also have Kyrie Irving. This game could get ugly quickly for the Magic—not that the entire season hasn’t been for them.
When LeBron James left the Cavs for the Heat in 2010, Cleveland bottomed out. They trotted out one of the worst rosters in NBA history, a mishmash of non-contributing veterans and “young talent” without a lot of upside, and were rewarded with the top pick in the 2011 draft. The Magic are on pace to rack up a similarly impressive number of losses in the first season of the post-Dwight Howard era. The difference is that they have four players acquired this offseason (Andrew Nicholson, Kyle O’Quinn, Nikola Vucevic, and Moe Harkless) who already look like they will be legitimate rotation players with productive NBA careers. And that’s before you add Lamb and Harris. This amount of losing is much easier for a franchise to swallow when it’s done with this much young talent already in place before they land their Kyrie Irving. They’re banking on the 2013 or (more likely) 2014 drafts and the 2014 free-agent class for that.
The earliest the Cavs will realistically contend for a title again is the 2014-15 season, and it’s obvious what has to happen for that pipe dream to become reality. LeBron can become a free agent, and there are already rumblings that he’s eyeing a return to the team that drafted him. Whether he would leave Miami if Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh are still reasonably healthy is a different discussion, as is the idea of LeBron and Dan Gilbert mending fences after LeBron’s ridiculous TV special and Gilbert’s somehow more ridiculous Comic Sans open letter. But put the undisputed best player in the world on a team with the premier young point guard, the blossoming Tristan Thompson, and two more years’ worth of lottery picks, and yeah, I’d say that team would contend. If they don’t land LeBron, they might be another couple of years away beyond that. But they’re on the right track.
The Magic’s future title hopes rest largely at the feet of one high-schooler, and their path there is even less certain. Orlando is banking on continuing to bottom out next season and landing Andrew Wiggins in the 2014 draft. And even if that happens, Wiggins has to live up to the “best high-school prospect since LeBron” hype, which isn’t unthinkable or even unrealistic but also isn’t a sure thing. There are other paths back to contention, but as Tim Duncan, Kevin Durant, and LeBron himself have shown us, the best way for a small-market team to get great ad stay great is to land a transcendent, once-in-a-generation-level talent in the draft. That player doesn’t appear to be in this year’s draft, so the Magic are playing the long game and hoping for Wiggins or Jabari Parker.
Tonight’s game between these two teams doesn’t matter a great deal, but it does give us a chance to view two case studies in modern-day NBA roster building and rebuilding in action, at various levels of completion.
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