Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s team is getting absolutely smoked by the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals. They lost game one by 25 points, and game two by 33. They play game three tonight, but starting a series with consecutive blowouts has to be tremendously deflating. A major cog of this dominant, unfair, Goliath of an NBA team –the Warriors– is Draymond Green. Green does it all; he can pass, shoot, rebound, and he’s arguably the NBA’s best defender. And the Cavs could have had him. They had three draft picks that year(2012), two of which were in the second round. In fact, Cleveland owned both the 33rd and 34th picks in the Draft… and Green went 35th. To this day, Gilbert is haunted by passing on Green. From ESPN’s Ramona Shelbourne:
Gilbert thought back to the call he’d gotten from Michigan State coach Tom Izzo at the end of the first round of the 2012 NBA draft. Izzo had told him, “You gotta take my guy.” The Cavs had two second-round picks, and Izzo was calling Gilbert, a Michigan State guy, to tell him that Draymond Green was the real deal. “I still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat that we didn’t take him,” Gilbert says of Green, who torched the Cavs for 28 points in the Warriors’ 110-77 win in Game 2 of the Finals. “I didn’t listen to my gut.”
Wow, that’s got to be hard. I’d be waking up in cold sweats too, if I were Gilbert. Now, the player that he passed on twice in a row is a key piece on the team that is dominating his team in the NBA Finals. The Cavs drafted Jared Cunningham at 24, Tomáš Satoransky at 33, and Jae Crowder at 34. They then bundled those picks and traded them to the Dallas Mavericks for Tyler Zeller(the number 17 pick). So yeah… Not the best draft by Cleveland.
Through two games vs. the Cavs, Draymond Green has averaged 22 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists, and 2.5 steals per game, while shooting 51.6% from the field, 50% from three-point range, and 100%(5-5) from the free throw line.
