In many ways Okoro was the victim of circumstance and lack of developmental vision.
Trading Isaac Okoro for Lonzo Ball was widely praised as a good move. I found myself agreeing that a divorce was needed for both parties to grow and elevate their respective ceilings. Now, how much of that is on Isaac Okoro and how much of that is on the Cleveland Cavaliers?
There were notable asterisks that needed to be built into the selection when Okoro was drafted fifth by the Cavaliers back in 2020. One, the 2020 draft was weird during the pandemic. It was essentially a virtual process conducted over Zoom calls.
The second asterisk is that the 2020 draft was thought at the time to be a very shallow draft outside of the top three (Anthony Edwards, James Wiseman, and LaMelo Ball). The Cavaliers made their selection based on positional over current talent. Okoro was always mocked as a lottery pick, not necessarily a top-five selection that comes with a different level of expectations.
Okoro didn’t come into the best environment as a rookie. The 2020 Cavaliers were a team with possessions dominated by a young Collin Sexton and Darius Garland. This left Okoro with little to no on-ball opportunities. Okoro’s progression basically played through his shooting development. In the corner, with little to no offensive flow. The Cavaliers’ offense then, along with the team as a whole, stunk. They were a group with no offensive identity, and with questions of who the offensive leader was. It wasn’t a place for a rookie to blossom, especially one like Okoro, who came in with a lot of offensive questions already.
Okoro worked on operating as a one-ball creator in Summer League after his rookie season. Like in college, Okoro flashed cause he played at his best with the ball in his hands in transition and was a smart decision maker as a passer. Did it translate to the regular season? No, nothing really changed. This was the start of the trend where the Cavaliers never actually developed Okoro. His shooting splits went up on lesser volume and more concentrated locations (aka the corners).
That story arc would plague the rest of Okoro’s tenure in Cleveland. A player with an insanely high defensive upside, but offensively would improve his outside shot without becoming a well-rounded weapon. The variety of his game became stale fast. There felt like there was such an emphasis on the corner three that Okoro never really got to expand on anything else. It was rare to see him do much more than that or take one-dribble drives in the halfcourt.
Instead, the mentality was the same game after game. Then, when the playoffs hit, the warts got ever more apparent. Okoro was the one that opposing teams were BEGGING to beat them. In all the series the Cavaliers played, Okoro never could.
Instead, he found himself struggling to stay on the floor. Every year, the narrative was “Okoro has become a good three-point shooter, now the Cavaliers can use his defensive prowess and not play offense four on five!”. Only to have Okoro riding the bench by Game 3 of a series.
While the simple answer you’ll hear is, “If Okoro hit his shots, he would still be on the Cavs,” there also needs to be a finger pointed at the Cavaliers. He wasn’t going to ever be an All-Star, but he had the potential to be a dynamic role player.
Okoro has all the athleticism in the world that is on display defensively on a night-to-night basis. The Cavaliers saw that and said, “Now what if we take that athleticism and stick him in the corner every possession?”
Hopefully in Chicago, Okoro can be given a proper development path. One that takes advantage of his raw athleticism rather than forcing a square block in a triangle-shaped hole.