"He's sort of the perfect fit for a team that wants to play fast and shoot threes," Griffin said Friday in Sacramento. "We've had interest in him for quite a while."
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SACRAMENTO -- Cleveland Cavaliers General Manager David Griffin started scouting sharpshooter Kyle Korver years ago, when Griffin was with the Phoenix Suns. He put out feelers for Korver last season, as the Atlanta Hawks dropped from the top spot in the Eastern Conference to fourth.
Griffin's persistence finally paid off over the weekend, as the Cavaliers struck first during trade season.
"He's sort of the perfect fit for a team that wants to play fast and shoot threes," Griffin said Friday in Sacramento. "We've had interest in him for quite a while."
Early this season, Griffin approached Hawks General Manager Wes Wilcox, seeing if the Hawks were willing to move the soon-to-be free agent and what it would cost.
"Just tried to stay close to it to capitalize on whenever they may or may not be ready to make a move," Griffin said. "I'm grateful to Wes and Bud (Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer) for sticking to their word as we went through the process."
The two sides completed the deal Saturday, with Cleveland sending Mike Dunleavy, Mo Williams and a 2019 first-round pick to the Hawks for Korver.
The Cavs, as Griffin explained, used part of their $9.6 million trade exception from the Anderson Varejao-Channing Frye swap last February. In the process, the Cavs created a pair of new trade exceptions worth $4.8 million and $2.2 million (the salaries of Dunleavy and Williams), which will expire next January.
"It's highly unlikely a team that's running our cap and tax numbers is going to be able to use the full bandwidth of that number and the number of players that fit was really small in terms of people we had any realistic expectation we could acquire," Griffin said of using a portion of the large trade exception. "We wanted to do something where we reset the deck with a couple that were going to be usable for another year. It gives us the most flexibility that we can have moving forward into the summer.
"We've got a couple (exceptions) that are going to expire in July. With the minimums changing (in the new CBA) and everything else moving forward it's going to be hard to use those small ones because I think they are probably going to be smaller than minimum, but (team counsel and basketball administration manager) Tony Leotti and (senior director of strategic planning) Brock Aller are just amazing with what they do and everything with cap space. Essentially that was their creation."
Before the Korver trade was finalized, the Cavs worked a side deal with the Portland Trail Blazers, swapping first rounders in 2017 and 2018. That small move allowed the Cavs to send their 2019 pick to Atlanta without violating the league's "Stepien Rule" that prevents a team from trading away future draft picks in consecutive years.
"That's something we talked about really early on -- even before training camp -- if it was something Portland would have interest in," Griffin said. "We didn't want to incentivize Portland to do something like that because we really didn't have enough assets to move around, but if it made sense for them it was something we were open to doing because what it really achieves for us is it gets us a pick that we could trade this trade deadline if we wanted to in the future before the time horizon goes away for which you're allowed to move first-round picks. By moving everything up a year we actually almost got another pick to utilize heading into this trade period."
Even after adding Korver, the Cavs will continue to look for ways to improve. With a future first rounder among the team's assets, it could be another trade. Cleveland could also wait until buyouts, signing a free agent to fill its one open roster spot. Either way, the search will center on a backup point guard -- or "playmaker," as Griffin termed it Friday.
"All season long, we've known we need more playmaking, and just more intelligence at times on the floor in terms of the decision making," Griffin said.
That's one spot where Korver could help. While it's not his forte to set teammates up for shots, he can create with his movement, giving the league's fourth-ranked offense a new dimension.
"His feel for the game and his ability to generate offense for us that isn't dependent on point guard play necessarily was important for us as well," Griffin said. "You can run him off pin-downs and a lot of different actions that we didn't have the ability to run beforehand. The nature of his game lends itself to creating some other things."
Head coach Tyronn Lue said Korver will continue to come off the bench, with Iman Shumpert going into the starting lineup for DeAndre Liggins in the short term.
Korver's sluggish start -- 2-of-10 from the field and 0-of-5 from 3-point range -- isn't cause for concern. But the Cavs will need to keep tinkering with the lineup, hoping to find the best way to use him and which combinations make the most sense for his skill set. That may eventually lead to Korver going into the starting lineup while J.R. Smith remains out.
"We certainly would have liked to have added (Korver) had J.R. not gotten hurt," Griffin said. "Maybe the urgency in terms of the timing may have been different from our standpoint, but again these things, you can't really dictate when the time to strike is and you just need to do it when you can.
"One thing that has been important to us is that early on you like to make moves so that guys have time to get acclimated before the playoffs. We wanted to do this as early as we could and we try to do everything as early as we can in a season just to make sure everybody is on the same page."
