NextGen Roster Building
A look at how the Raptors, Thunder and Cavaliers are all thinking outside the box
As draft analysts, we hold these truths to be self-evident:
Development is not linear
The draft is about future projection, not current production
When building a team from a tear-down, you have to look at where the league is trending to figure out how to best win in the future
The first two are, due to their simplicity to comprehend, widely understood. No two prospects have the same trajectory or timeline. Beyond that, drafting players with “high ceilings” or whose game has room to grow as they age is widely accepted as a better practice for a pro team than taking a fifth-year senior who appears to have already maxed his potential.
The third requires a great deal of thought. At the basis of drafting players comes the idea of getting them all to mesh on-court and create an environment that allows them all to combine into a championship-caliber formula. Evaluating individual players isn’t always the hardest part about roster construction or drafting. Sometimes, properly envisioning how to develop pieces of your team and get them to fit together is the largest challenge.
Executives and front office personnel have to simultaneously nail the evaluation, properly project how the player fits next to the long-term pieces they already have and then be able to forecast an identity of the team that makes them unique enough to stand out while being talented enough that they’re hard to stop.
Three teams have engaged in pseudo-rebuilds over the last couple of offseasons, and their teams are starting to take shape. The Toronto Raptors, Oklahoma City Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers are at vastly different points in their journeys. The Cavs are, as a surprise to many, a top-four team in the Eastern Conference after missing the postseason the last three years. The Raptors, still recovering from a wonky COVID season and the departure of Kawhi Leonard following their 2019 NBA Championship, have moved younger without spiraling out to the bottom. The Thunder are at the bottom, willingly so, and sitting on a stockpile of future picks.
What’s the common thread between these teams that leads them to be the focus of our piece?
Length.
At the basis of their quick or slow roster changes has been one similar idea: that length is the ultimate tool to constructing a winning team for the next decade. It’s rooted in wholesale changes we’ve seen over the last decade to positionless basketball and greater skill levels being taught to big men at younger ages. Today’s big men are tall but want to pass like Nikola Jokic, shoot like Dirk Nowitzki and defend like Draymond Green. And they do so — in high school, in AAU games and in the quiet gyms where they refine their craft.
These three teams have started to accumulate more length, banking on two aspects to fill out their roster. One, the versatility of all the length they acquire to make for a diverse team offensively. Second, that by getting so many long-armed prospects, scoring on them will be a nightmare for any team that doesn’t embrace the same trend.
Length: It’s True Value
From a philosophical standpoint, offense is about spacing and spacing is about offense. The more space a team can create, the more they can generate open looks at the hoop. Today’s game, heavily influenced by analytics in terms of shot selection and off-ball spacing, has become fairly vanilla. Every team buys into the concept of taking corner 3-pointers, a maximization of ROI for a shooter (most amount of points at the shortest distance from the rim) and sees the value in forcing defenders to rotate to the corners, which stretches out a defense. Every team tries to encourage attacks on the rim, still the highest-value shot location, and does so through face-up penetration, not frequent back-to-the-basket acumen.
If those are offensive principles that are generally accepted, than the inverse is also true: defense becomes about minimizing, or shrinking, the space available for an offense. Defenses want to take away those two key areas for shot selection (catch-and-shoot 3-pointers and rim attempts) while encouraging them to shoot in the mid-range, one of the least efficient areas for most players.
The question is how can a defense accomplish that?