A case study in 'blowing it up' for a rebuild

This is a Cleveland (insert new nickname) baseball blog.  But sometimes we have to talk about other things to get back to baseball.

In this case, I want to talk about doing an extreme makeover on the Cavaliers.  Also, this could serve as a blueprint for what we might want to do with the Indians in 2020 if that season is not going well.

Now, I am not the biggest Cavs fan in the world, to be sure.   But they are my hometown team and I do follow them pretty closely.  Anyone who has seen them play this year has one hope:  they are just coasting through the season and will turn it on when it counts.  Well, what if the likelihood of this happening is very small?  Then you have to consider tearing it down and starting again.

 Right now the Cavs have one mega trading chip and some questionable other ones. It's not a great situation for a quick re-tool or even a less than quick rebuild.

The point here is that the Cavs have built this roster to win now.  They signed guys to extensions to keep the nucleus together.  Those extensions, in and of themselves, were made based on the perceived value of those players to the Cavaliers winning the NBA championship (e.g., Thompson, JR Smith, Kyle Korver).   However, those contracts make it harder to do a complete tear down as these players were overvalued by their home team compared to what their production would indicate.  Plus I don't know if the veterans they have on veteran minimum contracts are tradeable and, if they are, how much would they bring back.  So the Cavs really SHOULD tear it down at this point as it appears more and more each day that LeBron is gone after this year.   However, the Cavs really can't, unless their GM is a genius and the players on their roster have much more value to other teams than I think they do.  So they may have to go for it again this year and that likely will send them deeper into the hole by trading picks and young assets to get veterans they need, which, in turn, will make a rebuild even harder.  It becomes a never-ending cycle when LeBron leaving looks more and more like a certainty every moment.  So you might have to sell REALLY low and look for a horrible and long rebuild.   Frightening for any long-time Cleveland sports fan, I am sure as you might have TWO major franchises in your city that no one cares about.

By 2019 or 2020 the Indians might be in the same position, depending on the luck that they have.  The good news is that I don't see a single bloated contract on the Indians.  At this point, except for Kipnis, all their marquee players are VERY tradeable.  Plus, we are not going out and signing compensation free agents and losing draft picks.   All that is good for the Indians.   But we need not to follow the Cavs example.  If we do, by next year, we might be needing a rebuild or a re-tool and we night not be able to make that happen.

Let's hope the Indians long term plan continues to allow flexibility for a complete rebuild, if necessary.  I don't ever want to be in the position the Cavs find themselves right now...let alone in the position the Browns find themselves.