Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Kevin Love And Kyrie Irving Trades That Could Get Cleveland Over The Top

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

The Cleveland Cavaliers were built to cruise through multiple ticker-tape parades. Their towering payroll would make James Cameron blush, and five of their six highest-paid players are locked up for at least the next two seasons—the sixth being LeBron James, who will opt out of his contract this summer and either get paid a lot or make everything you're about to read a moot point by deciding not to return.

Cleveland is two losses away from a very uncomfortable confrontation with the future. If they're once again eliminated by the Golden State Warriors, how can they look themselves in the mirror and just roll things back for another invigorating stroll through the Eastern Conference behind their 32-year-old icon, and expect a different outcome next June?

Injuries were Cleveland's undoing in 2015, and left LeBron to attempt the impossible more or less by himself. This year, they're all out of excuses; Kevin Love's Game 2 blow-to-the-head aside, the Cavaliers have all their best players right where they want them to be, and it hasn't helped. Unless the Warriors suffer an asterisk-inducing injury in 2017, it's hard to imagine these Cavaliers winning a championship in their current form.

Dramatic change may be the only answer, and dramatic change is hard to imagine here, too. Unless James flees Ohio or re-signs for less than a maximum contract, the Cavaliers won't have enough cap space to add any worthwhile pieces this summer. Even if they did—given their current depth chart (whispering: the Cavaliers have a lot of talent) and a string-bean thin list of unrestricted free agents—it's unclear which targets could actually improve their rotation.

To better match up with the Warriors, a team that's been built to dominate through the rest of LeBron's prime, the Cavaliers are most in need of versatile, athletic perimeter defenders that can shoot, and defensive-minded bigs who can protect the rim and hog-tie slippery ball-handlers 25 feet from the basket. In this way, they are exactly like every other team in the league. In another salient way, they're worse—beyond scraps at the bottom of the market (who's super pumped for E'Twaun Moore?), Cleveland doesn't have the resources to sign anyone talented enough to push them past the Warriors. They have no draft picks, either. So.

Back in October, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert said this about Cleveland's roster construction:

"We look at this year by year. There's so many factors, so many things can change. We always like to have options. It's not so much the amount of payroll. The question is if you can maneuver. If the team goes a certain way, are all the contracts valuable? Can your general manager still play chess? We never try to say this is [the budget]. It really is how it operates."

Thanks to the rising salary cap, Gilbert knows Love and Irving's contracts are super valuable around the league. Both players have tremendous talent and skills that aren't easy to find. But if the Cavaliers fall, it may be in Cleveland's best interest to swap one out for a package of pieces that better complement the greatest force in franchise history. James is aging, but he's also irreplaceable. Everybody else on the roster is an asset.

Which brings us to the trade market. The most popular and obvious candidate to be dealt is Love, for a couple reasons: 1) His production within Cleveland's system could mostly be replicated by Channing Frye and Tristan Thompson over the next two years, and 2) the Warriors are really good at making Love look like a small child who has become very, very lost.

The three-time All-Star—who's younger than Steph Curry—can fetch the Cavaliers a flexible 3-and-D wing and/or some more rim protection, whether through a deal to Boston for Amir Johnson and Jae Crowder/Avery Bradley, Milwaukee for Khris Middleton and Michael Carter-Williams or Utah for Derrick Favors and Alec Burks. These are intriguing hypotheticals, if imperfect ones; several juicy draft picks would have to be involved to make any of these deals work. In a vacuum, Cleveland won't receive fair value in any of these deals, but the NBA doesn't exist in a vacuum. Anyway, forget about that: add any of these players to Cleveland's roster and it immediately looks more stout in battle against the Warriors.

Of course, there's inherent risk in trading one of the league's 20 best players—which, his downturn in Cleveland notwithstanding, Love still is—for a team that's far and away superior to everything else in the Eastern Conference. Love isn't a total horror show on defense, but he also can't protect the rim or plug up a pick-and-roll. He needs the right kind of support to truly thrive, but it seems clear that he could do that in the right system. If Cleveland wants to try to get the players that system would require, it could explore a riskier but infinitely more interesting blockbuster deal based around Irving, a whirling tasmanian devil of a playmaker who is a blast to watch, but whose flaws are deservedly shoved under a microscope over and over again.

Irving's defense is an ongoing issue that probably won't correct itself anytime soon. He ranked 451 out of 462 players in Defensive Real Plus-Minus this season—between Kobe Bryant and Andrea Bargnani—and looks it. He has poor instincts, exhibits pure cluelessness in transition, and has a penchant to crumble every time he collides with a pick. He can also put points on the board at a crazy rate, but he needs protection from the rest of the lineup just as Love does; to the right team, in the right setting, he could be even more valuable.

We'll get to the clearest trade partners in a second, but let's first take a look at a few outside-the-box possibilities (that probably won't ever happen):

The Minnesota Timberwolves can offer Ricky Rubio, Zach LaVine, and Gorgui Dieng, but surrendering that much for one of the league's premier defensive liabilities would likely make Tom Thibodeau's eyes bleed. The Houston Rockets can throw Patrick Beverley, Trevor Ariza, Montrezl Harrell (a Rich Paul client) and their unprotected first-round pick in 2018 into the ring, but Daryl Morey's conscience wouldn't be clean knowing he exposed audiences all over the world to the X-rated sight of Irving and James Harden trying to guard Steph Curry and Klay Thompson at the same time. Cleveland's defense and lineup flexibility would improve in a deal like that, but too much offensive responsibilities would again fall on LeBron's shoulders—they'd forfeit one of the game's most dynamic individual scorers for three players who can't create their own shot. LeBron's first stint in Cleveland is proof of how far that sort of team can go—which is far, but not nearly far enough.

The New Orleans Pelicans can offer Jrue Holiday and Quincy Pondexter. That deal may actually work in a world where both those guys didn't just have surgery. The Orlando Magic would offer their entire team, but nobody on their team is good enough right now to make the deal worth it for Cleveland. That's no knock on the Magic—well, it kind of is—but it's a problem that keeps coming up in trying to game out Irving trades. Top 15 offensive weapons who're in their early twenties, who are still improving and locked into a team-friendly deal basically never get traded. Teams will make offers if Irving is available, but only a few partners even feel semi-realistic: the Los Angeles Clippers, Phoenix Suns, and Washington Wizards.

If LeBron honestly had no influence on the Cavaliers' personnel decisions, swapping Chris Paul for Irving would be a fairy tale; it's too damn risky. Paul is 31, seven years older than Irving, and can become an unrestricted free agent next summer. But James would welcome that deal with open arms, and understandably so. Paul would make next year's Cavaliers better than this year's Cavaliers; he's a better all-around player than Irving, immensely so on the defensive end. He communicates, stays under control, and reigns supreme as a master of tempo. Paul makes the right play and fully understands that the best shot for himself isn't always the best shot for the team. Where Irving's physical gifts zoom ahead of his brain and he misses vital subtleties, Paul is relentlessly in command.

If you're the Clippers, you take the slightly-lesser player who's more in line with Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan's timeline and make him a bridge to the franchise's next era. It's not a no-brainer of a deal. because Paul is so damn brilliant, but could be one the Clippers would accept.

Another All-Star point guard who makes sense in a straight up swap is John Wall. It feels like a lateral move for both teams, but Wall is a much better fit beside LeBron and Love, and his All-Defensive-team length and athleticism would give Curry and Thompson fits. Of course, his outside shot is still very much a work in progress, and that could muck up Cleveland's spacing if LeBron's range really is gone for good. But Wall is less selfish than Irving, a hurricane in transition who gets easy buckets and does a great job setting teammates up with open looks.

It's unclear whether the Wizards make this trade, for all the basic reasons that franchise players are rarely dealt. Wall lifted Washington out of seriously dark times; shipping him out for a player whose only edge is being younger and under contract for one more year may not be enough to pull the trigger—even if Wall and LeBron share the same agent.

The last option is yet another Rich Paul client: Phoenix Suns point guard Eric Bledsoe. Again, the defensive upgrade is what really matters here, and if Cleveland's sole objective in dealing Irving is to find more dependability on that end without abandoning a nightly advantage on offense, Bledsoe isn't a bad solution. It helps, too, that the Suns wouldn't think twice about making this trade. Irving is a better player than Bledsoe, and fit is much less concerning for a team that just won 23 games.

Both Wall and Bledsoe just had knee surgery, which further complicates matters, and Cleveland may be willing to talk itself into internal improvement as a path to eventually dethroning a Warriors team that may not have Festus Ezeli and Harrison Barnes next year. Andrew Bogut and Andre Iguodala—arguably the thickest thorn LeBron's ever had in his paw—will be a year older, too.

But the stakes are too high for Cleveland to stand pat and hope their biggest obstacle spontaneously falls from grace. Curry and Thompson are both still on the right side of 30, and the Warriors still give the impression of playing a year or so ahead of the rest of the NBA. If Cleveland is going to catch up, they'll have to gamble.

Everything revolves around the delicate balance between long-term stability and short-term success. A championship should mean everything to this organization, but they also don't want their post-LeBron era to look like a wasteland. None of this will be easy, but then neither will winning the four games that presently separate the Cavaliers from a title, one season after they came up two short. If this team can't manage that task, it's probably time to start building one that could.

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