By Ian Levy

Nylon Calculus, brought to you by The Step Back

The Cleveland Cavaliers’ season got off to a rough start. But after stumbling to a 3-5 record through their first eight games, the Cavaliers have won 18 of their last 21 games, including a 13-game win streak that rocketed them up the Eastern Conference standings.

LeBron James has been phenomenal, having one of the best seasons of his career at age 33, and looks like a strong MVP contender. However, figuring out how to best fit the role players around him into a coherent rotation has been just as important to the Cavaliers’ resurgence.

The earliest change the Cavaliers made was moving Dwyane Wade out of the starting lineup. Having Wade operate as the de facto point guard off the bench plays to both his strengths and those of the rest of the second unit, and avoids redundancies between Wade’s skillset and LeBron’s.

Dwyane Wade Bench Units Without LeBron James

Lineup Minutes OffRtg DefRtg NetRtg

Wade-Osman-Korver-Green-Frye 53 117.0 110.1 6.9

Wade-Smith-Korver-Green-Frye 43 103.2 97.4 5.7

Wade-Shumpert-Korver-Green-Frye 31 113.0 105.4 7.5



The J.R. Smith version of these lineups is something of an outlier, middling offense and very good defensively, but all three of these units have been extremely effective. The recipe is fairly simple -- put four shooters around Wade and let him go to work breaking down the defense. Wade’s assist percentage is a robust 41.2 percent when LeBron is on the bench (about the same as John Wall across the entire season).

Wade is not quite the player he was in his younger days but the spacing afforded by these lineups gives him plenty of room to work and he is still an effective scorer off the dribble -- he’s in the 53rd percentile in efficiency as an isolation scorer this season, and the 65th percentile as the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll.

The other significant adjustment to the Cavaliers rotation came when Jose Calderon was inserted into the starting lineup after injuries removed both Iman Shumpert and Derrick Rose. So far that group -- Calderon, Smith, Crowder, LeBron, Love -- has been absurdly good offensively, and outscoring opponents by an average of 10.7 points per 100 possessions.

Calderon is playing less than 20 minutes a game but he’s a low-usage ball-mover with an excellent outside shot, which makes him a perfect complement to the starters. He doesn’t take anything away from LeBron or Kevin Love and in the 14 games he’s started, Calderon has 35 assists to just 14 turnovers and he’s made 51.4 percent of his 3-pointers.

That starting group could potentially have an even higher ceiling together. For as well as Calderon, LeBron and Love have been playing individually, Smith’s 3-point percentage is at 36.5, a few ticks below the 38.2 percent he’s averaged since coming to Cleveland. Jae Crowder’s percentages are down as well -- 59.4 percent in the paint and 31.3 percent on 3s, down from 72.8 and 39.8, respectively, last season. As those numbers progress towards the mean, this unit could be even more difficult to guard.

For as smoothly as the Cavaliers rotations are running right now, the tinkering probably isn’t done. Both Rose and Shumpert will be healthy at some point and could be useful to varying degrees. Tristan Thompson has also just returned from a leg injury. On paper, the Cavaliers could certainly use his defense and rebounding -- the team currently ranks 27th in defensive efficiency, 23rd in offensive rebound percentage and 25th in defensive rebound percentage. However, Thompson isn’t an outside shooter and so the trick will be integrating him without sacrificing the spacing that has juiced Cleveland’s offense.

The last big question is Isaiah Thomas, who has been playing 3-on-3 in practice but still has no timetable for his Cavaliers debut. Thomas is a much more versatile and potent offensive player than Calderon but that fact that he’s more of an on-ball, high-usage creator will require adjustments from a starting lineup that has found an excellent rhythm together.

LeBron is, incredibly, putting together another MVP campaign. But the ceiling on the Cavaliers will be set by the role players around him and how well Ty Lue can keep pushing the right buttons in building his rotations.