SH Blog: Are Dion Waiters and Tristan Thompson the Future in Cleveland?

Will he overcome them to the point where he is an All-Star caliber player? 

Maybe not.

But there will always be a place on my team for a player like Thompson. He’s a tireless worker, a young and vocal leader and has improved throughout each of his first two seasons. He’s flexible in position. Not only can he play the 4 or the 5, but he can also defend 3’s in some instances.

Thompson has all of the tools to be a great shot blocker and shot contester. He plays great on ball defense, gobbles up rebounds and has invented his own offensive move, a running push hook that seemed strangely unguardable at times last season.

Nobody expected Thompson to come in and set the league on fire. Cleveland admittedly reached for him at No. 4 overall, but through two seasons he’s shown no signs of a being a mistake. He’s progressing, and there’s something to say for that.

As an undersized, non-elite athlete — as Duncan states — with limited offensive ability, he’s averaged a solid 11.7 points and 9.4 rebounds per game through two seasons on a team without an offensive or defensive system.

After starting center Anderson Varejao went down with a season-ending injury on December 18th, Thompson seized the opportunity for an expanded role and began to flourish. He averaged 13.7 points and 10 rebounds per game during those last four months of the season.

Give a player like Thompson a few years with Mike Brown and a roster that doesn’t ask him to play out of his depth and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what his ceiling becomes.

As for Dion Waiters, Duncan sees him as:

Offensively he was quite a mixed bag. He shot very poorly overall, with a 49 percent True Shooting Percentage. The Syracuse product made 31% of his 203 three-pointers and 54 percent of his 275 tries at the rim. He wasn’t too bad on long 2s at 41 percent, but really struggled in the mid-range, shooting just 31 percent from 3-16 feet. Despite the bad shooting overall, he rode a 26.1 percent usage rate to a decent PER of 13.9 at age 21. He also proved an extremely low-turnover player for a rookie guard.

If Waiters can improve his defense to passable levels under Brown’s tutelage, he should mature into a reasonable starter at the 2. While he does not have ideal defensive size for the shooting guard position, his inexperience and inattention is the bigger problem.

While many believe Waiters’ future is as a sixth man, a deeper look at the stats shows he could prove a solid complement to Irving as a starter if he can dial back his usage a bit and concentrate more on playing off others. This will allow him to utilize his already solid spot up game and attack off closeouts.

Duncan is correct when he says Waiters is a mixed bag, and at times, extremely puzzling. His first few months in the league caused a lot of head scratching. But looking back, his season as a whole was not as bad as his errant shot selection at times.

Waiters averaged over 15 points per game for three separate months, or about half the season. Waiters accomplished this as a 20-year old rookie on a team, under Byron Scott, that was basically playing pickup basketball for most of the year, interchanging D-Leaguers and playing without a Center (and Kyrie Irving for long stretches).

After injuries to Irving and Anderson Varejao, the Cavs had nobody to surround Waiters with. He became the de facto go-to scorer, and was forced to, much like Thompson, play well out of his depth.

Obviously this can lead to things like a bad shot selection, careless turnovers and lackadaisical defense, Dion’s three biggest areas of concern after one season.

But what he also proved is that he has the style of play and talent to be a successful player in this league, and with time, will hopefully learn how to harness his energy and decision making into a more efficient player.

Player A	13.9 ppg	2.4 apg	3.8 rpg	13.69 PER
Player B	9.2 ppg	1.2 apg	4.1 rpg	11.08 PER
Player C	14.7 ppg	3.0 apg	2.4 rpg	13.77 PER

 

Stat’s aren’t everything, especially after year one, but to add some perspective: Player A is Bradley Beal, Player B is Harrison Barnes and Player C is Dion Waiters.

While everyone is much higher on Beal and Barnes than Waiters, can that largely be attributed to the lack of exposure Waiters has had while being the sixth man at Syracuse and playing on a Cavaliers team with no nationally televised games last season?

This year Waiters will have his chance to prove his worth.

So will Tristan Thompson.

And so will the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Ben Baroff is a basketball journalist who blogs for SheridanHoops.com. Follow him on Twitter here.