The Cleveland Cavaliers won the draft lottery for the second straight season and the team beat out the Bucks and the Sixers for the number one overall pick and those two teams pick second and third and now the Cavs could be in play for a Kevin Love trade with the Timberwolves and they also may feel better about Kyrie Irving staying long term and the chances of LeBron James signing as a free agent.
The Cavaliers won the draft lottery for the second straight season and now they have the chance at picking Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker or Joel Embiid and this comes after the team drafted Anthony Bennett last season. The Cavs got lucky, as Bennett has so far been a bust and now they have the chance to add another premier player to the mix. The Bucks had the worst record in the league and missed out on the number one pick and they settled for number two, while the Philadelphia 76ers ended up in the number three pick.
The team had only a 1.7 percent chance compared to the 25 for the Bucks and good fortune once again smiled on the Cavs and after the pick, GM David Griffin said that the team has not made any decisions regarding their pick yet. The team was slotted to ninth and now they are number one and this is one of the deepest drafts in memory, with a number of players past the top picks, including Aaron Gordon, Kyle Anderson, Doug McDermott, Nik Stauskas and Julius Randle. While it's way too early to tell, getting the number one pick could set the team up to get into the Kevin Love trade mix, as they have that selection to move along with players like Tristan Thompson and Dion Waiters. Obviously it will take much more to make a move like that, but it at least gives the team some hope for signing Kyrie Irving long term.
Irving's future has long been speculated upon and this season he grew frustrated with the constant questions about it and now it likely will come up again. Getting the number one pick sure helps in that regard, as this draft is considered much better than last season and now the Cavaliers have to ensure they don't screw it up again like they may have last season. It's not fair at all to judge a rookie after one season, but Bennett was very bad and he has some strides to make this offseason.
The conversation now will turn to whether it will be Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Joel Embiid or someone else at number one and that could be a decision for the ages. Wiggins came into the year as the presumptive number one pick and he was very good at Kansas along with Embiid, while Parker led the Blue devils in scoring and rebounding in his one season at Duke.
The draft lottery showed just how perfectly it always, always works, as the team with the worst record once again did not get the top pick and the same team got it two years in a row. So, you know, working perfectly. This could be the universe's way of correcting itself after LeBron James left Cleveland and now they have received three first overall draft picks since 2011 when they drafted Kyrie Irving.