It was more than six months ago, in the heady moments after Andrew Wiggins became the first overall selection in the NBA draft, that Wiggins said something wise beyond his 19 years.

He’d just been picked by the Cleveland Cavaliers, this in the days before LeBron James would decide to flee Miami to return to the hometown squad where he began his career. And while at the time James’s theoretical free-agent landing spot was only the stuff of speculation, Wiggins was asked what it might be like if King James chose to join the Cavs.

“We’d be good together,” Wiggins said.

Wouldn’t they ever. All it’s taken is half a rookie season to see that the Cavaliers made a grave mistake trading Wiggins to the Minnesota Timberwolves in a deal that landed them all-star forward Kevin Love. With Love proving an underwhelming presence — and with the discordant, defensively inept Cavs labouring to a 21-20 win-loss record at the midway mark — a trade that was designed as a win-now measure already looks like a regret-forever misstep.

Wiggins, let’s be clear, is the sure-thing rookie of the year. He’s averaging about 15 points and four rebounds a game, more than respectable figures, for sure. And to give a measure of how rapidly he’s improving, he was averaging about 21 points a game in January before going off for a career-high 31 on Saturday night in Denver.

What’s more noteworthy, maybe, is the enormity of his matchups. On most nights he often finds himself guarding the best player on the opposing team. One night it’s Kobe Bryant. Another it’s Kevin Durant or Rudy Gay or James.

Sam Mitchell, the ex-Raptors head coach now serving as an assistant in Minnesota, said top players have routinely targetted Wiggins with an eye toward intimidating and dominating.

So far, it hasn’t gone particularly well.

“The top guys, when they play him, they test him. And what they find out is that: one, he’s not going anywhere; two, he brings it right back to ’em; and three, he has a lot of talent,” Mitchell said. “Durant came to town. He tried to go at Andrew a little bit. They were talking a little trash. And all of a sudden Andrew came down and just had three or four great moves against Durant. And you could just look at Durant saying, ‘Okay. I’d better leave him alone. He’s going to be all right.’ ”

Cleveland can only drool. While the Cavaliers are one of the worst few defensive teams in the league — and while Love, never known as a gifted defender, has proven more of a liability than many imagined — Wiggins is already showing himself to be a willing defensive presence.

The six-foot-eight, 199-pound teenager who leads all rookies in scoring cites the less glamorous side of the ball as his current strength.

“Young guys come into the league, they’re usually thinking offence,” Mitchell said. “This young man came in thinking defence — it’s very rare.”

It sounds as though he would have been the perfect candidate to learn under James, probably the smartest player in the league. What stings for the Cavaliers is that they aren’t brimming with talent on the wing, where Wiggins shines. Would he and James have been too similar in their skill sets? Hardly. As one member of an NBA coaching staff said recently: If Love wasn’t around — and he’s a free agent at season’s end — Cleveland could easily flip James to power forward, a configuration with which Miami found plenty of small-lineup success.

That’s not to say Wiggins would have made Cleveland any more of a contender than Love in the near term; the Cavs are short of depth in a handful of areas, not least of which is head coaching (where the presence of Euro-bred NBA rookie David Blatt continues to stretch logic). But Love’s credentials as a team-carrying beast haven’t translated (the Cavs have gone 1-7 with Love in the starting lineup and James sidelined). And Wiggins’s rookie-scale contract would have done wonders for a crowded Cleveland salary-cap situation that is making it difficult to bolster the roster.

James, meanwhile, isn’t getting any younger. It’s a measure of how quickly time flies that James recently passed Larry Bird on the all-time minutes-played list. It took Bird until past his 35th birthday to nudge past the 34,000-minute mark. James got past Bird around the time he turned 30 last month. While James’s brilliance and relative durability have made him indispensable, they’ve also made him a high-mileage machine. His current franchise, in other words, has squandered a natural succession plan.

There are still question marks around Wiggins. Playing for one of the worst teams in the league might not be the finest developmental situation ever devised. His jump shot still needs work — although he seems to be improving rapidly, shooting 48.5 per cent for January heading into Saturday after labouring through a 40 per cent November. And there will always be those who wonder, given Wiggins’s laconic humility, about whether his internal thermostat is set hot enough to maximize his generational genetics. Mitchell, who approaches such topics with a disclaimer — “There are no perfect players” — sounds like a believer in the affirmative.

“The thing that I love about him: he’s a laid-back personality, but he has a fire in him,” Mitchell said. “He has a level of toughness that most people don’t realize he has. When people challenge him, he responds . . . He just has a quiet confidence about who he is and what he can do. It’s like everybody was worried about Andrew but Andrew. There was all this talk. Everybody was worried about this and worried about that. But everybody was worried about him but him.”

The peer reviews have been impressive.

From Kobe Bryant: “It was like looking at a reflection of myself 19 years ago.”

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From Durant: “You could tell he’s like a sponge, soaking up as much knowledge as he can.”

And from James: “He’s a great talent . . . He’s very poised and very efficient. They got a good piece.”

They got a piece the Cavs will forever lament letting slip away. The NBA championship is very much up for grabs this season. But the Cavs have too often been a mess to believe they’re a turnaround away from a title. Coached by a neophyte, lacking depth, laughably bad on defence — they could use a humble, explosively talented 19-year-old from the GTA both now and down the line.

The work is just beginning for both the Cavs and for Wiggins, but the latter’s upside seems far more bankable. They would have been good together, beyond a doubt.

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