The Cleveland Cavaliers trading Dennis Schröder to the Charlotte Hornets last week certainly looked like a setup deal. Well, now we know what the Cavaliers are setting up. According to ESPN, the Cavaliers are acquiring Peyton Watson from the Denver Nuggets.
They will send Max Strus to the Los Angeles Clippers, and the Cavaliers will send a 2031 unprotected first-round pick and a 2032 second-round pick from the Sacramento Kings to the Nuggets to complete the trade. Additionally, the Cavaliers will send Tre Mann, cash and a 2027 second-round pick from the Clippers to the Washington Wizards for Cam Whitmore. The Wizards are sending Julian Reese to the Nuggets.
As part of the arrangement, Watson will sign a four-year, $88 million deal with Cleveland that includes a player option and a trade kicker.
To recap:
Peyton Watson trade details
| Team | Acquires |
|---|---|
Cavaliers | Peyton Watson (who agreed to a four-year, $88 million deal) |
Clippers | Max Strus |
Nuggets | 2031 first-round pick (via Cavaliers), 2032 second-round pick (via Kings), Julian Reese |
Wizards | Tre Mann, 2027 second-round pick (via Clippers), cash considerations |
Hornets | Dennis Schröder |
So, how did everyone fare in the trade? Let's grade it to find out.
Cleveland Cavaliers: B
Watson was a breakout player last season, but is his success repeatable?
The Cavaliers have essentially spent the entire decade looking for an athletic small forward who could shoot 3s and defend. Just think of all the resources they've poured into that exact archetype. A top-five pick on Isaac Okoro. A big contract for Strus. A deadline deal for De'Andre Hunter. Smaller investments in players like Dean Wade and Georges Niang. This has been their white whale during the Donovan Mitchell era. Watson represents their biggest swing yet.
A year ago, a trade and contract like this would have been crazy. Watson was barely even in Denver's 2025 playoff rotation and had never been a full-time starter. But in 40 starts last season, Watson averaged 17.3 points on just under 50% shooting from the floor and 43% from deep.
Now, most of that 3-point success came from the corners, where he made over half of his attempts. But he shot over 45% from the corners during the 2024-25 season, so it's reasonable to assume at this point that he's a reliable corner 3-point shooter at this point. Being a reliable shooter makes him that much more dangerous as a backdoor cutter, a skill any athletic forward who plays with Nikola Jokić tends to pick up. He started to really grow as an individual shot-creator when Jokić was hurt in January. During that stretch, almost 33% of his points were unassisted. That's not a star figure, but it's a meaningful one.
Watson's defense has always been a bit more theoretical than real. He has excellent athletic tools, and he's been good on that end of the floor, but remember who he's replacing here. Cleveland lost its two best on-ball defenders in free agency: Wade and Keon Ellis. Watson will now presumably be tasked with guarding just about every opposing star in the Eastern Conference, regardless of position. Remember, Cleveland's two other perimeter starters are Mitchell and James Harden. They're not stopping a nosebleed. That means Watson will have to be similarly adept at guarding point guards (which he tends to do well) and forwards (an area he'll need to improve in). The bar here is going to be high even with Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen behind him.
The cost here isn't exactly trivial. Strus was a different sort of player, one less in line with what Cleveland needed, especially given the development of Sam Merrill, but an important one nonetheless. His absence for most of last season wasn't the biggest reason the Cavaliers fell from 64 to 52 wins, but it was significant. Trading any first-round pick five years into the future is precarious. That 2031 pick will convey after Mitchell's age-34 season, when he will make almost $76 million. They'd better have another plan at guard by then, because James Harden will be 40.
They're also betting on a fairly small sample here. Remember, the Nuggets could have given Watson a rookie extension last offseason and chose not to. We've only really seen about half a season's worth of starter-level play from Watson, and while the upside he displayed in that window was considerable, it was followed with a hamstring injury that effectively ended his season. Can he hold up physically with the workload Cleveland will expect him to carry? Only time will tell.
But Cleveland was dying for this sort of player. They badly needed athleticism and size on the wing and they got the best available player who offered it. Given the improvement in the Eastern Conference and the frankly embarrassing way they went out against the New York Knicks, this was the sort of swing Cleveland had to take if it was going to keep up with the Joneses in the standings. Getting the talented but mercurial Cam Whitmore as a lottery ticket is a nice little cherry on top.
Denver Nuggets: D-
Losing Watson closes Denver's championship window with Nikola Jokić even more
Any unprotected pick five years into the future is valuable. Nobody is denying that. Its value to Denver, specifically, is pretty minimal. Nikola Jokić is a 31-year-old three-time MVP. His time to win is now. In theory, a 2031 pick is at least a helpful trade chip they could use to add another win-now piece. In practice, the money is going to make that extremely difficult.
The Nuggets technically create a $10.2 million trade exception by making this deal... except as a second apron team already, they can't use it. They also can't aggregate salaries without getting under the second apron, which will be fairly tough. So realistically, their path to using that pick as a trade asset this year would most likely involve trading away a starter. I just ranked Christian Braun as the NBA's ninth-worst contract. It would cost that pick just to get someone to take him. They could move Cam Johnson on an expiring contract, but this is already a low-volume 3-point shooting team. They really can't afford to lose him. Aaron Gordon is Mr. Nugget. He's also stylistically irreplaceable.
Maybe they can pull a rabbit out of the hat. Maybe they wind up trading that 2031 pick for a pick in an upcoming draft, as Calvin Booth did with future Nugget picks in the past. But even then, such a prospect would take time to develop that Denver likely doesn't have. And of course, such a player would almost certainly be worse than Watson.
Regardless of Jokić's age, Denver's window is going to get smaller with each passing year. So will everyone's in the Western Conference. The older the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder get, the harder it will be to genuinely compete with them. On paper, that makes this season the single most important year remaining in Jokić's career. His best chance at a second championship is right now.
Frankly, those championship hopes were reliant on Watson. Braun's five-year, $125 million contract was a disaster. He is a backup-level player. Johnson was a downgrade on Michael Porter Jr., a downgrade they paid a 2032 first-round pick to make. Denver's only real chance of keeping up with the Thunder and Spurs was Watson maintaining his performance from last season, but over a fully healthy year. He was their upside, their only meaningful young player with room to grow.
And they didn't even get a player back for him because they were so expensive that they technically couldn't. When signing-and-trading a player of your own to another team, taking back another player in the trade using the trade exception that player creates triggers a second-apron hard cap. The Nuggets are already over the second apron. Even if they could have taken back an inferior replacement player, they probably wouldn't have. Remember, the Nuggets are a repeater tax team. As of right now, with only 13 players under contract, they have a $285 million payroll, according to Yossi Gozlan.
Paying Watson what Cleveland paid him or taking back an equivalent salary would have taken the Nuggets above $400 million, giving them the most expensive payroll in NBA history. There was just never any reasonable indication that Denver was willing to pay that much for its roster.
But they should have. Remember, the Nuggets are already over the second apron. All of the restrictions it imposes already apply. At this point, we're only really talking about money, and money from the family that also owns the Colorado Avalanche, Los Angeles Rams and Arsenal FC. They could have let Johnson walk next summer to reset the finances, making this year's payroll a giant, one-off tax bill.
But that tax bill would likely pale in comparison to the surplus value Jokić has generated for this organization through his below-market contracts (even at the max, he has never been fairly paid for his production, and he arrived in the NBA as a second-round pick earning a relative pittance) and what he has added to the franchise's valuation. I bring this up because Jokić could technically become a free agent next offseason. All signs thus far have indicated that he plans to stay in Denver. Making the team worse by trading an important player without getting one back is a way to make him reconsider those plans.
At this point, I'm not sure it's ever fair to consider the Nuggets fringe contenders. They'll have the same opening night starters that they did a year ago, but have since lost their Sixth Man of the Year finalist (Tim Hardaway Jr.), their backup center (Jonas Valančiūnas) and now, their best young player (Watson) following a first-round loss to a Minnesota Timberwolves team that ended that series essentially without its entire guard rotation. It's a sad decline for a team that once had dynastic potential.
