The deal
Lakers get: Guard Isaiah Thomas, center Channing Frye, Cleveland's protected 2018 first-round pick
Cavaliers get: Guard Jordan Clarkson, forward Larry Nance Jr.
Get more trade grades for every deadline deal here
Cleveland Cavaliers: D
This trade, already difficult to understand, got more confusing in the wake of the Cavaliers' subsequent deal for George Hill and Rodney Hood.
By acquiring Clarkson, who is owed $12.5 million in 2018-19 and $13.5 million the following season, Cleveland has cleared the path for the Lakers to create the cap space necessary to sign both LeBron James and another max free agent this summer.
It would be one thing if the Cavaliers were resigned to James' departure and therefore helped facilitate it in order to improve their post-LeBron future. Instead, they treated Clarkson like a valuable piece, only to potentially bury him in the rotation hours later.
We can probably treat Thomas more as an expiring contract than the player who finished fifth in MVP voting less than a year ago. (Look it up! It's true.) Thomas' brief stint in Cleveland went disastrously enough that simply moving him will almost certainly make the Cavaliers a better team.
Because of his defensive limitations, exacerbated by the hip injury that sidelined him for about nine months, Thomas needs to be a good offensive player to be valuable. As a bad one, Thomas was one of the league's worst players. His minus-5.9 rating in Basketball-Reference.com's box plus-minus metric was ninth worst among players who have seen at least 250 minutes of action this season. (Worse yet, one of the eight players behind Thomas on the list was his backup, Derrick Rose, who was subsequently traded as well.)
Nance also figures to be a good fit as a backup center, supplying the lob threat Cleveland really hasn't had this year with Tristan Thompson no longer looking as spry. Nance's 59 dunks this season are more than any Cavaliers player has, save James, per Basketball-Reference.com. If Cleveland's second unit includes both Nance and Cedi Osman, who impressed in Wednesday's overtime win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, we may see actual athleticism and energy of the kind that has been lacking all year.
Still, getting Nance for the remaining year and change on his rookie deal should probably have been the price Cleveland charged for taking on Clarkson's contract and sending back the expiring deals of Thomas and Frye. Instead, the Cavaliers also sent the Lakers their 2018 first-round pick, turning this deal from a confusing one to a bad value.
Clarkson looks like an especially poor fit for a Cleveland team that just added two superior guards. At heart, Clarkson is a volume scorer. In this, the best season of his career, Clarkson's .532 true shooting percentage is still far below the league average of .556. He's best cast propping up units that have few other scoring options and would have trouble generating the below-average shots he's able to create. Second Spectrum's qSQ metric measures the effective field-goal percentage (eFG) an average player would post on the same shot attempts accounting for distance, type and location of nearby defenders. Clarkson's .491 qSQ ranks 176th of the 224 players with at least 250 shot attempts this season.
Going to Cleveland should mean easier spot-up opportunities. Unfortunately, Clarkson is a middling outside shooter whose 50.7 percent eFG on catch-and-shoot jumpers (treating 3-pointers as 1.5 field goals to reflect their added value) ranks 121st out of the 184 players with at least 500 such attempts since 2014-15, per Second Spectrum data. (By comparison, Kyrie Irving has ranked fifth in this group at 63.1 percent effective shooting.)
Then there's defense. At 6-foot-5, Clarkson has the size to defend either backcourt spot. Nonetheless, the Lakers have typically defended far worse with Clarkson on the court, as his stats page on CleaningTheGlass.com shows. Clarkson has bucked that trend this season as part of a Lakers defense that ranks 11th in the league on a per-possession basis. As is often the case, opponents shooting worse on 3s with Clarkson on the court appears to be a factor in the trend reversing itself.
Overall, the multiyear version of ESPN's real plus-minus rates Clarkson 2.4 points per 100 possessions worse than league average defensively, a mark that puts him among the bottom 10 point guards in the league. (Thomas, at minus-3.2 points per 100 possessions on defense, is among the players behind Clarkson.)
If the Cavaliers were going to shop a package of their first-round pick and expiring contracts, I'd much rather have pursued Tyreke Evans of the Memphis Grizzlies. Evans is a better outside shooter and more efficient scorer than Clarkson, and on an expiring deal for the bargain price of $3.3 million. Taking on the remaining two years of Clarkson's contract and giving up a first-round pick was too much to pay.
Los Angeles Lakers: A
Trading Clarkson was more or less a necessary part of the Lakers' path to creating two max salary spots this summer. Even if the Lakers instead decide to roll over their cap space to the summer of 2019, as ESPN's Ramona Shelburne and Adrian Wojnarowski reported earlier this week, this trade still made sense. After all, Clarkson was under contract through 2019-20, so if the Lakers were going all-in on free agency he was going to have to go at some point. That the Lakers were able to move Clarkson without giving up a pick is a clear win.
Having the extra $12.5 million in cap space this summer will come in handy even without signing a max free agent (or two). The Lakers can take advantage of the limited cap space available in free agency to make lucrative one-year deals to players, as they did last summer with Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, to remain competitive in the interim.
Moving Nance wasn't so obvious a decision, but getting the first-round pick back from Cleveland softens the blow. Nance for the pick would have been a reasonable deal, and probably a win for the Lakers because they'll get up to four years of cost control as compared to the year-plus remaining on Nance's rookie contract.
Nance became a tougher fit in the Lakers' 2019 plan because his cap hit would balloon from his $2.3 million 2018-19 salary to $6.8 million as a restricted free agent. By contrast, the Cavaliers' pick will have a salary somewhere in the range of $2 million in 2019-20.
The Lakers do take on an "island of misfit toys" look the rest of the season. Thomas, who grew up a Lakers fan (one story of the origin of his name has to do with his father losing a bet on the Lakers beating Isiah Thomas' Detroit Pistons in the 1989 NBA Finals), has long desired to play in L.A. But this probably wasn't exactly the circumstances he had in mind.
How Thomas' ball-dominant style will fit with the developing talents of Lonzo Ball and Brandon Ingram is difficult to see. Yet Shelburne reported the Lakers plan to keep Thomas and play him heavy minutes the remainder of the season.
The other heartwarming note here is that Frye is reunited with Lakers coach Luke Walton, his teammate for two seasons at Arizona.