CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Cavs finally made themselves impossible to ignore.
After a long stretch that had fans wondering whether president of basketball operations Koby Altman’s phone was still in service, Cleveland got busy last week. First came a trade for 23-year-old Nuggets forward Peyton Watson, with veteran forward Max Strus and an unprotected 2031 first-round pick heading out before Strus was re-routed to the Clippers. Then, a day later, the Cavs brought back 11-time All-Star James Harden on a three-year, $97 million deal.
That’s not quiet. The bigger question is whether it’s enough where it matters most.
Regular-season wins are one thing. The playoffs are another, and that’s the standard these moves have to survive.
Watson gives Cleveland something it badly needed: size and athleticism on the wing. The appeal is obvious if you squint at his six-week burst last season, when he looked like a two-way difference-maker.
From Dec. 31 through Feb. 4, Watson averaged 21.5 points and 5.5 rebounds while shooting 48.5% from the field and 43.9% from 3.
That stretch included 16 games in which Denver leaned harder on his shot creation while Nikola Jokic was sidelined.
He also finished last season at 41% from 3-point range, and over his last two seasons he’s hit better than 45% from the corners.
That’s the dream version of the move. The caution sign is that Watson’s sample is still thin, and a lot of what made those numbers pop came with Jokic feeding him clean looks.
Watson attempted just 3.6 3-pointers per game last season, a career high, and NBA.com tracking data says he was open or very open on 192 of his 197 attempts. That kind of room doesn’t just appear on command, especially in the playoffs.
If Watson’s volume stays low in Cleveland, or if the percentages don’t hold with more responsibility, the Cavs could still run into spacing issues - especially if he’s sharing the floor with both Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen.
There’s also the matter of experience. Watson has never been asked to play the role Cleveland seems to have in mind for him in the postseason.
Across three playoff appearances, he has never averaged more than 14.5 minutes per game. During his breakout 2026 run, he was on the bench with a hamstring injury for Denver’s first-round series.
So Cleveland is betting on a promising player with real tools, but still a lot to prove.
Harden is a different kind of gamble.
The Cavs kept him in place with a contract that comes with a fully guaranteed salary, a player option and a trade kicker - the kind of setup that makes an already difficult player to move even harder. At 37, entering the late stages of his career, he’s not the sort of star teams usually tie themselves to so tightly.
Still, Cleveland had reasons to do it. Last postseason, the Cavs’ offense was 11.1 points per 100 possessions better with Harden on the floor than off it. He gave them something they couldn’t easily replace, and neither side was going to approve a deal without some understanding of what his next contract would look like.
Even so, the price is steep.
Harden’s numbers faded as the playoffs went on last year, and it’s fair to wonder whether that was age, wear and tear or the old postseason reputation catching up to him again. Either way, players don’t usually solve those issues in their 18th NBA season. They especially don’t do it while carrying Harden’s kind of workload.
He was the 15th 36-year-old in league history to log at least 36 minutes per game in a playoff run last postseason. If he does that again next spring, he’ll join LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Jason Kidd, Karl Malone, John Stockton and Robert Parrish in a pretty exclusive group. None of them won a title in their age-37 season.
And that’s only the first year of the deal.
The contract includes a player option two years from now, and if Harden is still playing at 39, that $34.7 million figure could shape what comes next. Retirement could even enter the conversation. If Cleveland ever tries to move him before then, it would likely need to attach an asset.
So yes, the Cavs got better. Watson adds the kind of length and pop they were missing, and Harden keeps the point guard spot covered with a player they had no real path to replace.
Whether that turns Cleveland into a title team is a much harder sell. That answer lives in the gap between believing in an aging star and trusting a six-week hot streak.
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