The deal
Cavaliers get: Guard Rodney Hood, guard George Hill, rights to Arturas Gudaitis
Jazz get: Forward Jae Crowder, guard Derrick Rose. second-round swap rights with Cleveland in 2024
Kings get: Forward Joe Johnson, guard Iman Shumpert, Miami's 2020 second-round pick, right to Dimitrios Agravanis, cash considerations
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Cleveland Cavaliers: B+
For the Cavaliers, this three-team trade is the synthesis of two separate trades. The first is dealing Shumpert, a second-round pick, cash and an expiring contract for Hill, the framework of which has been public for some time.
After using two expiring contracts (Channing Frye and Isaiah Thomas) in the day's earlier trade with the Los Angeles Lakers, Cleveland needed a new one to send to Sacramento. Enter Utah, which had Joe Johnson to send to the Kings, making the deal legal. As part of the process, the Cavaliers and Jazz swapped Crowder and Rose for Hood.
Suddenly, Cleveland finds itself with an almost entirely new backcourt, having added Hill, Hood and Jordan Clarkson from the Lakers to holdover J.R. Smith. The common themes here are the Cavaliers adding size and shooting on the perimeter. Cleveland's point guard rotation of the 6-foot-3 Hill (who plays even bigger thanks to a 6-foot-9 wingspan) and the 6-foot-5 Clarkson will be one of the league's biggest, while the 6-foot-8 Hood has excellent size for a shooting guard.
Hill actually leads qualifying players by shooting a career-best 45 percent from 3-point range so far this season. That's better than his track record, but he's shot at least 40 percent each of the past three seasons. Meanwhile, Hood is also enjoying his best season in terms of 3-point accuracy, having made 39 percent of his attempts beyond the arc with a career mark of precisely 37 percent. (Clarkson is the exception here, having shot 32 percent on 3s this season and 33 percent for his career.)
This group should help right the ship for the Cavaliers. As compared to the struggling Thomas using nearly 30 percent of the team's plays with a sub-.500 true shooting percentage, the point guard combo of Hill and Clarkson will be a huge upgrade at both ends. And Hood is an offensive upgrade over the departed Crowder, though Dwayne Wade and his contributions off the bench may be missed to some extent, as he was traded to Miami.
The challenge for Cleveland is the team's ceiling is also lower. While I'd give the Cavaliers a better chance now than before of surpassing the Boston Celtics and Toronto Raptors to reach the NBA Finals for a fourth consecutive season, I don't think this group has as much upside against the defending champion Golden State Warriors.
There's no secondary shot creator on the perimeter capable of playing the role Kyrie Irving did in past NBA Finals, and though Cleveland matches up better with Golden State's backcourt, Crowder could have played an important part defensively in the frontcourt. These trades leave the role played by Richard Jefferson in the past two Finals matchups solely to Jeff Green.
Perhaps the best hope of the Cavaliers winning a championship this year was for Thomas and Crowder to play like they had for the Boston Celtics. Of course, nobody knows better than Cleveland what the chances of that happening were from a health standpoint with Thomas and a conditioning one with Crowder. The Cavaliers' decision to move on is certainly understandable.
Whatever upgrade Cleveland made this season will come at a financial cost. After cutting about $3 million off their tax bill with the Lakers trade, the Cavaliers added almost $16 million to it by taking on Hill's $20 million salary (and Hood's $2.4 million). With the subsequent Dwyane Wade trade, Cleveland is looking at a tax bill that should surpass $50 million when the team fills its open roster spots after the deadline. Never let ownership's willingness to spend on a winning team be questioned.
Beyond this season, Hill's $19 million 2018-19 salary is slightly more expensive than what Crowder and Shumpert will make combined. Even if LeBron James leaves in free agency, the Cavaliers will have only somewhere in the neighborhood of $10-$15 million below the luxury tax to fill out their roster.
Filling out the roster includes re-signing Hood, a restricted free agent Cleveland would surely want to keep. But as much as Dan Gilbert and the ownership group may have been willing to spend in pursuit of a championship and to retain James, it's unlikely that they'd be willing to pay the tax for a team without him. Hence the reports the Cavaliers hoped to get Hill to reduce the guaranteed portion of his 2018-19 salary in case they decide to waive and stretch his contract.
As ESPN's Bobby Marks notes, Cleveland would be looking at a historic tax payment if James does return. The Cavaliers with James would be some $20 million-plus above the tax line before looking to re-sign Hood. But they'll deal with that if it happens.
Utah Jazz: B
The going theory entering the season was that Hood would play a leading role after Gordon Hayward's departure. Indeed, he'd increased his usage rate to a career-high 27 percent of the Jazz's possessions while also posting a career-best .550 true shooting percentage.
Nonetheless, rookie Donovan Mitchell emerged as Utah's post-Hayward go-to guy, and the two players didn't fit together well. Mitchell was both using more plays and scoring more efficiently with Hood on the bench, per NBA Advanced Stats, and the Jazz were playing far better with Mitchell alone.
Part of the problem is that Hood's defensive advanced stats have never matched his reputation as a long-limbed, versatile wing defender. Hood gets relatively few steals for a guard and is a mediocre defensive rebounder, so his defensive rating in ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM) has typically been poor. This season, Utah had given up a team-worst 107.7 defensive rating with Hood on the court, though opponent 3-point shooting exacerbated Hood's detrimental effect on D.
So moving on from Hood before he became more expensive as a restricted free agent made sense. The decision Utah faced was whether to deal Hood for draft picks, or add an established player using Johnson's expiring contract. I like adding a player because the Jazz would have had a tough time clearing appreciable cap space this summer, and Crowder is an excellent buy-low candidate.
Though much has been made of Crowder's lofty RPM rating in Boston, he was a plus player by other all-in-one statistics as well. My wins above replacement player (WARP) metric rated him a combined 12 victories better than replacement level over the past two seasons, while Basketball-Reference.com's box plus-minus rated him 2.8 points per 100 possessions better than league average in 2015-16 and 1.6 better last season. His decline in Cleveland goes far beyond RPM.
Crowder has simply been a weaker player across the board this season, worse even than he played during his first two-plus seasons with the Dallas Mavericks. Odds are that won't continue, and indeed Crowder's shooting has started to come around after a frigid start. Since Jan. 1, per Basketball-Reference.com Crowder's true shooting percentage is .562, similar to what he posted two years ago before career-best 3-point shooting fueled an improvement in 2016-17.
The lingering question is why Crowder hasn't been the same defensive contributor. Despite playing primarily at power forward as a Cavalier, he's grabbing a career-low 10.8 percent of available defensive rebounds, and his steal rate has been way down the past two seasons. If the Jazz get the defender we saw with the Celtics, a contract paying Crowder less than the non-taxpayer midlevel exception is a steal.
Sacramento Kings: B
The marriage between Hill and the Kings was short and unhappy. He expected to play a larger role for a more competitive team, while Sacramento didn't get the bargain it expected when Hill signed on relatively late in the free-agency process. Dealing him for shorter contracts helps mitigate the damage.
The Kings had already moved rookie De'Aaron Fox to the role of starting point guard, limiting Hill to playing part-time off the bench and alongside Fox. He'd even picked up several DNP-CDs as Sacramento managed having too many veterans while wanting to play younger prospects.
When Hill played, despite the excellent 3-point shooting, he wasn't the same all-around contributor we saw in Utah. What's unclear is how much of that was Hill's unhappiness with the Kings and how much was the product of a lingering toe injury that surely played a factor in the Jazz moving on last summer. Either way, Hill's play gave him negative trade value months into his new contract.
Getting one expiring contract in return means Sacramento has created about $8 million in additional cap space next summer, with a small chance of even more if Shumpert improbably declines his $11 million player option. For what it's worth, the Kings also save the $1 million portion of Hill's 2019-20 contract that was guaranteed.
This deal further gives Sacramento a little more than $3 million in cash and a second-round pick in 2020, though clearing a roster spot to take back both Shumpert and Johnson (the latter of whom will likely be waived) required them to deal second-year guard Malachi Richardson.