Far before forward LeBron James helped the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first NBA Finals appearance in franchise history in 2007, the Cavaliers knocked on the door of an appearance in the championship series in the 1992 NBA Playoffs.
Led by big man Brad Daugherty, floor general Mark Price and others, the Cavaliers advanced all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals, where they lost to guard Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. Cleveland gave Chicago a real run for its money, as the series spanned six games and was even knotted up 2-2 at one point.
Former Cavaliers guard Ron Harper, who was gone by then, implied in an X post that if Cleveland never sent him to the Los Angeles Clippers in a controversial trade in 1989, the Cavaliers would have gotten over the hump at some point and reached the NBA Finals.
More winning season and winning the east….
— Ron Harper (@HARPER04_5) April 2, 2025
Years ago, Harper made a similar claim, going as far as to say that the Cavs would have won more than one ring if he’d been around for the long haul.
“I think we would have won more than one ring,” he said. “We would have had to beat Chicago, we would have had to beat Detroit, we would have had to beat the [Boston] Celtics. There were a few teams we would have had to play against, but I felt that we were young enough and naive [enough] to feel that we were that good.”
Harper came into the NBA with the Cavs in the 1986-87 season, was traded away from Cleveland in the 1989-90 season and remained in the NBA through the 2000-01 season. When the Cavs traded him away, they also gave up draft capital. They got two players in return: Reggie Williams and Danny Ferry. Ferry was the main piece of the return.
The decision to part ways with Harper early on in his fourth season in the NBA might have limited the team’s ceiling moving forward. Ferry was a solid role player for Cleveland across his 10-season stint with the team, but he averaged just 7.8 points per contest across 723 total regular-season games with the squad.
While Ferry was never more than a serviceable complementary player for the Cavaliers, Harper played near an All-Star caliber level with the Clippers for a long time after Cleveland traded him. He was a member of Los Angeles through the 1993-94 campaign and averaged 18-plus points per contest in every season with the team.
Harper even went on to win several NBA titles after his stint with the Clippers ended. He was a key part of the Bulls’ second three-peat in the late 1990s and retired from the league after he won two more championships playing alongside guard Kobe Bryant and big man Shaquille O’Neal on the Los Angeles Lakers.