Are the Cleveland Cavaliers starting the right players at shooting guard and center? (SPOILER ALERT: No.)

It’s been a year of peaks and valleys for the newly-formed Cleveland Cavaliers. They have bookended an eight-game winning streak – during which they looked dominant for periods – with an 0-4 stretch beforehand and their current 3-3 run, and are struggling to find consistency. They seem to alternate between elite and incompetent within individual games, last Wednesday’s loss to Atlanta in particular showcasing this see-saw effect as the Cavaliers dominated the first quarter only to sleepwalk their way through the following three en route to the worst blowout loss they’ve sustained on the year.

Cleveland’s starters have often gotten out of the gate quickly only to cool off as games settle in, and their cumulative performance has been relatively pedestrian. The Irving-Marion-James-Love-Varejao unit is still a net positive on the year, but an offense that would barely rank in the league’s top 10 falls a bit short of expectations even as the lineup ekes out league average defense.

Past the quarter mark of the season, the time has come for David Blatt to experiment with different opening combinations, and he has already begun to do so. His typical layering of first quarter substitutions has showcased slightly tweaked iterations of the current version in growing minute samples, and a couple of variations are outperforming the incumbents to fairly large degrees. He’s removed usual starter at shooting guard, Shawn Marion, in favor of Mike Miller over the last couple games, a good start given the dead-looking nature of Matrix’s legs. But more can still be done; in particular, it appears Anderson Varejao is hindering his star-studded peers while a better option exists elsewhere on the roster.

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Tristan Thompson has taken a mini-leap amid a contract year as he awaits restricted free agency in the offseason, and his ascension threatens to impact Varejao’s minutes and level of importance after both were already undercut by Kevin Love’s arrival. Thompson has outplayed Wild Thing, both overall and as his direct replacement with the rest of the typical starting lineup – these are Cleveland’s two highest-volume units thus far, and the differences in performance have been stark.

Despite Varejao seemingly holding the advantage offensively with a more varied skill set and deeper shooting range, the starters have been worlds better with Thompson in his place – a difference of over 17 points per-100, to be precise, enough to catapult the group from the above-noted low-end top-10 figure to a mark that would crush Dallas’s league-leading offense overall, according to NBA.com. A number of elements seem to reverse course entirely when Tristan enters the game, some expected and others relative surprises given what we’ve known about both players to this point.

Firmly in the former category is the way the unit rebounds with Thompson, who has entered the league’s elite on the offensive boards in particular. He’s currently third in the NBA in offensive rebounding percentage among qualified players, per basketball-reference.com, and Cleveland is recovering over 30% of their own misses when he plays with the starting unit. (They grab just over 25% with Varejao – still a good figure, but a cut below the elite number with Thompson.) He hounds the opposing glass with consistent intensity and a keen nose for the ball’s trajectory, and always seems to be the one coming out victorious on 50-50 balls:

All these second chances are a big part of why this unit has been so much better offensively than Varejao’s iteration despite the latter’s proficiency on pick-and-rolls and pick-and-pops. Thompson’s lineup is shooting nearly 42% from deep compared with just over 34% for Varejao’s, and while some of this is likely simple variance, the way Tristan draws bodies as he terrorizes defensive rebounders is opening up opportunities when he comes away with the ball:

Perhaps due to more simplistic play when Thompson is directly involved, his group has also turned the ball over far less often than Varejao’s (8.6% versus 14.5%). Pick-and-rolls with Tristan see the lane a bit less clogged as opponents are forced to respect his abilities as a lob finisher, and weakside help is induced more often as a result, opening up lanes elsewhere.

There are a number of discrepancies between the two defensively as well. Varejao boasts the slightly better on-court defensive efficiency figure over all minutes played on the season, but he just has not fitted as well with this specific unit. Cleveland’s middle-of-the-pack efficiency figure with Andy tightens to a mark that would best the league-leading Warriors defense over a full season when Thompson replaces him. Thompson is more effective in Blatt’s labor-intensive high hedge strategy versus opposing pick-and-rolls due to superior lateral movement and agility, and the Cavs are gifting teams far fewer easy buckets when he’s on the floor. Varejao just doesn’t have the speed or leaping ability to make plays like this:

They’re allowing lower shooting percentages from everywhere (a stingy 29.3% from beyond the arc), forcing more turnovers, and cleaning the defensive glass more effectively with Thompson in the lineup. Neither Varejao nor Thompson is anywhere near elite as a rim protector, but Tristan grades out more effectively here so far per SportVU data (50.6% allowed at the rim compared with 53.8% for Varejao), and teams are scoring a lower percentage of their points within the paint when he plays with the starters.

Fouls taken versus those drawn have been a positive area for the Cavaliers as a whole all year, and although the gap here has lessened somewhat in recent weeks, they are still drawing about three more calls per-48-minutes than they are committing. But that difference is roughly cut in half for the starting unit featuring Varejao, whereas it becomes a Grand Canyon-sized chasm when Thompson takes his place – this group has induced well over double the fouls they’ve taken in nearly 100 minutes together.

Put it all together, and there is great reason to believe Cleveland might be better off widening the minutes gap between the two to more than just a single minute per night. Some of Thompson’s advantages over Varejao may trace back to more time versus opposing units featuring their own bench pieces, but the contrast has been way too large to pin solely on this sort of factor. When one considers that LeBron James (plus-13.3 per-100), Kevin Love (plus-10.7), and Kyrie Irving (plus-14.0) have all been wildly more efficient with Varejao sitting on the year (and each has conversely been similarly more efficient with Thompson on the court, all per NBA.com), one has to wonder whether Tristan perhaps deserves his chance at opening games and facing top competition nightly.

A team lacking consistency is in need of some answers, and it would appear the numbers are making at least one such reply readily apparent. Blatt has mostly avoided any harsh criticism in his NBA debut, but now faces an early test as his squad looks to step over another stumbling block. Moving Miller into a bigger role coming off his injury is a start, but it actually fails to address a larger personnel issue that detracts more from Cleveland’s on-court results. Whether he’s willing to address these further shortcomings head on, and perhaps make some more rotational changes, could be a telling sign of things to come.

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