Cavaliers’ Mobley agrees to 5-year rookie max

Cleveland Cavaliers 7-footer Evan Mobley has agreed to a five-year, $224 million maximum rookie contract extension that could become worth as much as $269 million, agents Joe Smith and Thad Foucher of Wasserman told ESPN on Saturday.

Mobley, 23, has quickly become one of the league’s elite young defensive big men, finishing third in voting for Defensive Player of the Year in 2023 as well as being named an All-Defensive first-teamer.

He averaged 15.7 points, 9.4 rebounds and 1.4 blocks last season for Cleveland, while also posting career-high shooting percentages: 57.9% overall, 37.3% from 3 and 71.9% from the free throw line.

Since arriving as the third pick in the 2021 NBA draft out of USC, Mobley has helped lead the Cavaliers to finishing seventh in defensive rating last season, first in 2022-23 and fifth in 2021-22. Over that span, Mobley is also one of just four players — along with Anthony Davis, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Rudy Gobert — to have at least 300 blocks and 150 steals, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.

He also held opposing players to 0.86 points per direct play on isolations and post-ups last season, fifth best among players to defend three-plus actions per game, according to Second Spectrum’s tracking data.

Mobley had arguably his best performance as a professional in Cleveland’s final game of the 2024 playoffs when he posted 33 points, 7 rebounds and 2 blocked shots in 43 minutes in a Game 5 loss to the eventual champion Boston Celtics.

He also went for 11 points, 16 rebounds and 5 blocks in Cleveland’s Game 7 victory over the Orlando Magic in the first round — a win that gave the Cavaliers their first series victory without LeBron James on the roster in over 30 years.

In that Magic series, Mobley became Cleveland’s first player to ever have at least five blocks in consecutive playoff games, and his 21 blocks over the seven-game series were the most by a Cav in a postseason series.

He finished the Boston series with averages of 21.4 points and 62.7% shooting — joining James (2016 versus the Toronto Raptors) and Kyrie Irving (2017 versus the Celtics) as the only Cleveland players to average at least 20 points on 60% shooting in a playoff series.

It has been a productive summer for the Cavaliers, who not only have now inked Mobley to this max contract extension but also hired Kenny Atkinson to replace J.B. Bickerstaff as the team’s head coach and signed Donovan Mitchell to his own three-year, $150.3 million maximum extension, keeping together the core of a team that has gone to back-to-back playoffs and has won 99 games over the past two years.

Atkinson, long considered one of the league’s best developmental coaches, told reporters about wanting to get Mobley involved more offensively at his introductory news conference after being hired by Cleveland earlier this month.

“I do think we can schematically get the ball in his hands more, quite honestly,” Atkinson said, “and it’s going to be multiple ways.”

ESPN’s Tim Bontemps contributed to this report.