The Cavs have attacked almost all of their needs by acquiring players throughout the season.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have done an excellent job tweaking their roster this year to fit their needs.
They added perimeter depth and perimeter defense by acquiring J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert, and then picked up a rim-protecting big man in Timofey Mozgov.
But the Cavs still wanted more big-man depth, which they would need to face some of the size that they would see in the playoffs.
So what do they do? They go out and sign Kendrick Perkins. Everyone on ESPN — along with everyone on my Twitter timeline — seems to think that they just clinched a championship by adding Perkins.
But I’m not so convinced.
People seem to be remembering the Perkins from the Celtic teams that went to the NBA Finals two years in a row.
He was the defensive anchor to one of the better defensive teams in the league, but the reality is that Perkins is not that guy anymore.
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He has barely averaged a block a game ever since the knee injury that he suffered in the 2010 NBA Finals.
His Player Efficiency Rating has gone down every year since then as well, and so has his scoring average, not that he was much of an offensive threat in the first place.
Perkins also turns the ball over about 1.5 times per game, quite a bit for someone who has so little of a role in the offensive game plan.
Most of these come from the illegal screens he’s become so famous for setting. There is actually a video called five minutes of Perkins setting illegal screens on some kind of body building website, which brings me to my next point.
Perkins is slow, he can’t defend the pick and roll or pick and pop well, which is fine because it’s not like every team in the league thrives on those two things.
Oh wait, they do?
I’m not saying the Cavs can’t make the finals or even win the title with Perkins. They have LeBron James for God’s sake. I’m just saying that if they do, it’ll be in spite of him, not because of him.
Jimmy Watkins is a freshman studying journalism and is a sports writer for The Post. Let him know what you think about the Cavaliers additions on Twitter @JAjimbojr or through email jw331813@ohio.edu.
