This year, oh no. Pau has crushed it this year, having the best year of his career.
No way is he better than Dwight.
No way is he better than Dwight.
Before this season started, I would've given the edge to Dwight, but right now it's definitely arguable.
Before this season started, I would've given the edge to Dwight, but right now it's definitely arguable.
What should he do?
Should he blow up the team because the best player left as a free agent? Or should he try to grind through a season with what's left, hope it's good enough to eke into the playoffs and try to rebuild the pieces from there?
That was Cavs owner Dan Gilbert's dilemma in the wake of LeBron James' departure, and once he finished his project to permanently remove the comic sans font style from the PR playbook of every corporation in America, he set about with the latter plan. Unlike in 2003, there would be no tanking. The Cavs would try to get by without their star and make the best of it.
It was an interesting choice, because for a lot of NBA teams, selling hope is 90 percent of the game. It's not necessarily about being good or bad, in other words, but about the ability to excite fans in a team's eventual ability to be good. The Clippers, for instance, may stink, but with Blake Griffin dunking on people's heads and Eric Gordon going gangbusters, it's easy for them to sell hope.
In contrast, one reason James' departure left Cleveland so shell-shocked is that the franchise appeared to have little hope for the future without him. While the franchise has gamely ambled along at 7-10 this season, much of that concern remains. The team is projected to finish 30-52 according to today's playoff odds, which assign the Cavs only a 9.1 percent chance of making the postseason. Cleveland has been outscored by more than five points a game, which normally is a recipe for losing 50 games, and its schedule to date hasn't been particularly difficult.
Moreover, what James left behind was largely a veteran team built to play around him. The best player left, Anderson Varejao, is a defensive specialist who averages 8.7 points per game. The top scorer, Mo Williams, thrived on catch-and-shoot opportunities created by all the attention on James and is making half as many 3s as he did a season ago.
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If there's good news for the Cavs, it's that at least a few of those vets are likely to perform better than they've played so far. Antawn Jamison, most notably, is shooting only 40.5 percent from the field -- with his other rate stats largely unchanged, this appears to be a short-term fluke that will correct itself. They'd better hope so, as the Cavs rank 29th in offensive efficiency without King James.
Cleveland would also benefit from some decent production at James' vacated small forward spot. Jamario Moon struggled in 12 games as the starter, averaging just 9.8 points per 40 minutes and shooting 11-for-46 on 3s. His replacement, journeyman Joey Graham, has arguably been even worse; his nickname should be the stat-sheet vacuum, because he's doing the opposite of stuffing it. In 219 minutes, he has two steals, one block, two offensive rebounds and five assists.
At some point this season they'll probably be able to address that glaring weakness. Cleveland holds a $14.5 million trade exception from the sign-and-trade deal that sent James to Miami and sits far enough under the luxury tax line to easily fill the spot with a salary dumped by another organization. As we get closer to the trade deadline, we'll see the usual assortment of salary dumps by losing teams; if Cleveland can maintain contact with playoff contention, it can trawl through those waters for an upgrade at the 3.
Nonetheless, the larger issue remains. Even if the Cavs somehow manage to eke out a playoff berth as the No. 8 seed in the East -- something that remains plausible largely because it may take only 38 wins or so to qualify -- where are they heading next year? Or the year after?
Cleveland has virtually no good young players. Its best rising talent is 22-year-old power forward J.J Hickson, who was expected to emerge this season but has been surprisingly ordinary. He's averaging nearly a point every two minutes, but his shooting percentage has taken a dip without the easy buckets that James generated and his rebounding and defense remain question marks. For the second year in a row, Cleveland is playing dramatically better with him off the court.
After Hickson, the Cavs have two quasi-young talents in 24-year-old guards Ramon Sessions and Daniel Gibson. They've been around too long to hear the word "upside" tossed around much, but each has been much more effective this season than the year before and both are still young enough to get better. The dilemma is that, at 6-foot-3 and 6-2 respectively, it's difficult to play them together in the same backcourt.
Otherwise, well, can I interest you in Christian Eyenga? Samardo Samuels, anyone? Manny Harris? Those three are all 21 years old, but none plays much or is regarded very highly by talent evaluators. As far as rotation players go, every relevant Cavs player except for Hickson, Gibson and Sessions is at least 26. In all likelihood, this is about as good as any of them will ever be.
That might be good enough to get them into the playoffs as a No. 8 seed if everything breaks juuuuuuuust right. That's what has to pass for hope right now.
And it may be that way for a while. Cleveland isn't particularly good, but it's also not bad enough to have a good chance at a top-3 pick in the lottery -- which is where they got lucky enough in 2003 to rebuild the franchise in a nanosecond when they won the rights to James.
The Cavs don't have a ton of cap space, although some deft dealing at the trade deadline could change that. They don't have a great shot at a high draft pick. They have very little young talent in the pipeline. And most of their rotation players are at a point in their careers where they're more likely to get worse than better.
So what should Dan do now? Cross his fingers, I guess.
I'm not sure the Cavs had a lot of choices -- gutting the roster immediately could have been a disastrous long-term decision, and this blue-collar city admires the way the remaining Cavs have picked themselves up off the floor to battle. On the other hand, the bloom of that rose will fade quickly if they're still going 30-52 with veteran-laden teams two years from now.
We're still seeing how this will play out in Cleveland, but neither path looked particularly inviting. This time, The Decision wasn't controversial, but that doesn't mean it was any less difficult.
LeBron James has disappointed in Miami, but would he eventually have grabbed a ring in Cleveland?
The only thing Ric Bucher and Chris Broussard like to do more than report on the NBA is argue about the NBA. So we decided to combine those two skills for Insider's weekly One-on-One series, in which they'll debate the hottest topics in the association.
[h3]Question: Would LeBron James have won a title in Cleveland?[/h3]
BROUSSARD: As we all know, LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers this past summer to join the Miami Heat. LeBron had one thing in mind when he did so: winning championships. I contend, however, that he would have eventually won a title even if he had stayed in Cleveland.
BUCHER: I felt that way for a long time, too, and thought he'd be best served, if nothing else, to die trying to get the Cavs their first championship. But now that I review the culture of entitlement the Cavs created, and the fact LeBron couldn't get a Chris Bosh-caliber player to move to Ohio, I'm convinced it was never going to happen for him there.
CB: There definitely was a culture of entitlement, but they won 66 and 61 games in that culture. They couldn't get over the hump, but that's often been the history of NBA legends. LeBron's path was appearing similar to Michael Jordan's, who wasn't able to get past Boston and Detroit until he was 28, and Isiah Thomas', who kept falling to the Celtics and Lakers. Boston is going to get older very soon, and so will the Lakers. And the playoff failures were only making LeBron hungrier. So, as his hunger grew, he would have been forced to keep adding to his game (post-ups, improved free throw shooting). I think he would have eventually gotten that ring in Cleveland.
RB: Not getting over the hump proved to be a problem for a lot of teams that were regular-season wonders -- that's no harbinger of eventual success. The Dallas Mavericks won 60 and 67 games in back-to-back seasons. The Sacramento Kings had four consecutive seasons with 55-plus wins, including 61 in 2001-02. The Phoenix Suns won 60-plus twice in a three-year span. None won a ring, and only the Mavs even made it to the Finals. The Orlando Magic have won 59-plus in back-to-back seasons, and they're not any closer to a ring now, even though Dwight Howard is supposedly hungrier than ever. All those teams were tragically flawed, one way or the other. All had a missing link or two in the championship formula of owner-GM-coach-star-supporting star-role players. The reason I don't think LeBron could've won a ring in Cleveland is because, as you alluded, he's seven seasons in and we're still waiting for him to be hungry enough to do whatever it takes to win one.
CB: Those teams you mentioned also never had the best or second-best player in the league. Dirk Nowitzki, Chris Webber and Steve Nash, while superstars, are not the caliber of player LeBron James is. None of the all-time greats who haven't won rings -- Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Elgin Baylor, Charles Barkley -- were ever the first or second-best player in the league for several years running. LeBron has always been mentioned in the MJ, Magic, Bird, Kobe, Oscar category -- and rightly so. All the players on that level, the players who've had that level of game, won rings, and I think LeBron would have eventually legitimized his place among that group.
RB: When it comes to talent, I'd never dispute that LeBron James is the league's most gifted player. "Best player" has a different meaning to me; in short, it's someone who knows how to utilize that talent for the purpose of winning a championship. That's where LeBron's immense talent actually creates a problem, in much the same way Tracy McGrady's did. For the Cavs -- or any team LeBron plays on -- to win a championship, that team is going to need someone to lead it, set the pace and focus on a daily basis, do whatever is necessary to utilize the team's strengths and compensate for its weaknesses. LeBron has never done any of that. Not consistently. Not at the level necessary to win a championship. That much has been exposed every postseason. He wants to have fun and play the way he wants to play. That's his right. But I can't envision a scenario in which a championship-caliber leader would have agreed to go to Cleveland just to play with him. For seven years, no one even remotely considered it. Bosh, who is merely a complementary player, wouldn't even consider it. What would have changed over the next seven years?
CB: Let's stop with the revisionist history. For the past three or four years LeBron has, without question, been the best or second-best player in the league. It's easy to criticize him now, but let's not act like he's the only superstar who's at times been difficult to deal with. Phil Jackson wrote a whole book about how tough Kobe Bryant was to handle, how selfish he was. Bill Russell often sat out practice, á la Allen Iverson. Wilt Chamberlain told his employers he'd go to either morning shootaround or the game, not both. And Shaquille O'Neal's leadership and work ethic have been questioned, too. Yet all those guys won rings. Why? Because they can ball! And LeBron can flat-out ball.
RB: I'm not sure why you immediately compare LeBron to Jordan, Russell and Wilt when his career actually hews more closely to Iverson, Vince Carter and Dirk at this point. But I'll give you Wilt, since he was, in his time, a dominant talent who won titles only when he was with a Hall of Fame leader -- Hal Greer with the Philadelphia 76ers and Jerry West with the Los Angeles Lakers -- even though, based on his talent, Wilt assuredly was expected to win more. But even to compare to Wilt at this stage, LeBron would have to win a ring this season.
CB: Fact is, the Cavs were on the rise. For the first time in LeBron's career there, they had at least some type of continuity. Rather than switching several key players every season or two as they had done in the past, the Cavs would have stability with Mo Williams in his third season in Cleveland and Anthony Parker, Antawn Jamison and presumably Shaq in their second. That added chemistry would have been huge for the Cavs, at some point big enough to get them over the hump. And if you think chemistry doesn't matter, just take a look at the Heat.
While there are no excuses for Cleveland's failure last season, the fact is that the Cavs were in a tough spot heading into the playoffs. Shaq was returning from a two-month layoff, due to injury, and had played only three games with Jamison. Having those guys together for a season and having all the players hone their chemistry would have eventually been enough for James to deliver a ring.
RB: There's been plenty of reason to criticize LeBron over the past few years. Only a few did, though, because it was easier to look at the modest bodies of work by the players around him, LeBron's tremendous gifts and terrific statistics and place blame for any failure elsewhere first. Besides, it was Cleveland! What had that organization ever done? The general thinking was that LeBron was the only thing that it had going for it, and he was making some Herculean effort to make them what they were. What the move to Miami has exposed, however, are not just the fundamental flaws in his game but in his mindset. The Cavs were a great regular-season team because Mike Brown was a great defensive coach and LeBron, if you didn't have time to game plan for him, was an offensive handful. But their focus on a night-to-night basis wavered, as did LeBron's, and they paid the price for that every year in the playoffs.
Jamison is in his 12th season; Williams and Parker are in their seventh; Shaq is lucky to get through a season -- these are the guys who would've improved to make the Cavs better than the Lakers or Celtics this season? I suppose if you started from scratch with a rookie LeBron and held him accountable and built your team on championship principles rather than on what would appease him and didn't operate in fear of your cash cow leaving every three years, the Cavs might've won a ring eventually. But working off the culture created during LeBron's first seven years? I don't know of a hazmat company in the world up to that decontamination task.
What should he do?
Should he blow up the team because the best player left as a free agent? Or should he try to grind through a season with what's left, hope it's good enough to eke into the playoffs and try to rebuild the pieces from there?
That was Cavs owner Dan Gilbert's dilemma in the wake of LeBron James' departure, and once he finished his project to permanently remove the comic sans font style from the PR playbook of every corporation in America, he set about with the latter plan. Unlike in 2003, there would be no tanking. The Cavs would try to get by without their star and make the best of it.
It was an interesting choice, because for a lot of NBA teams, selling hope is 90 percent of the game. It's not necessarily about being good or bad, in other words, but about the ability to excite fans in a team's eventual ability to be good. The Clippers, for instance, may stink, but with Blake Griffin dunking on people's heads and Eric Gordon going gangbusters, it's easy for them to sell hope.
In contrast, one reason James' departure left Cleveland so shell-shocked is that the franchise appeared to have little hope for the future without him. While the franchise has gamely ambled along at 7-10 this season, much of that concern remains. The team is projected to finish 30-52 according to today's playoff odds, which assign the Cavs only a 9.1 percent chance of making the postseason. Cleveland has been outscored by more than five points a game, which normally is a recipe for losing 50 games, and its schedule to date hasn't been particularly difficult.
Moreover, what James left behind was largely a veteran team built to play around him. The best player left, Anderson Varejao, is a defensive specialist who averages 8.7 points per game. The top scorer, Mo Williams, thrived on catch-and-shoot opportunities created by all the attention on James and is making half as many 3s as he did a season ago.
Are you going to the game? Check in with ESPN Passport for iPhone, or check in online to archive your memories.
Check in »iTunes »
- 10 fans checked in
If there's good news for the Cavs, it's that at least a few of those vets are likely to perform better than they've played so far. Antawn Jamison, most notably, is shooting only 40.5 percent from the field -- with his other rate stats largely unchanged, this appears to be a short-term fluke that will correct itself. They'd better hope so, as the Cavs rank 29th in offensive efficiency without King James.
Cleveland would also benefit from some decent production at James' vacated small forward spot. Jamario Moon struggled in 12 games as the starter, averaging just 9.8 points per 40 minutes and shooting 11-for-46 on 3s. His replacement, journeyman Joey Graham, has arguably been even worse; his nickname should be the stat-sheet vacuum, because he's doing the opposite of stuffing it. In 219 minutes, he has two steals, one block, two offensive rebounds and five assists.
At some point this season they'll probably be able to address that glaring weakness. Cleveland holds a $14.5 million trade exception from the sign-and-trade deal that sent James to Miami and sits far enough under the luxury tax line to easily fill the spot with a salary dumped by another organization. As we get closer to the trade deadline, we'll see the usual assortment of salary dumps by losing teams; if Cleveland can maintain contact with playoff contention, it can trawl through those waters for an upgrade at the 3.
Nonetheless, the larger issue remains. Even if the Cavs somehow manage to eke out a playoff berth as the No. 8 seed in the East -- something that remains plausible largely because it may take only 38 wins or so to qualify -- where are they heading next year? Or the year after?
Cleveland has virtually no good young players. Its best rising talent is 22-year-old power forward J.J Hickson, who was expected to emerge this season but has been surprisingly ordinary. He's averaging nearly a point every two minutes, but his shooting percentage has taken a dip without the easy buckets that James generated and his rebounding and defense remain question marks. For the second year in a row, Cleveland is playing dramatically better with him off the court.
After Hickson, the Cavs have two quasi-young talents in 24-year-old guards Ramon Sessions and Daniel Gibson. They've been around too long to hear the word "upside" tossed around much, but each has been much more effective this season than the year before and both are still young enough to get better. The dilemma is that, at 6-foot-3 and 6-2 respectively, it's difficult to play them together in the same backcourt.
Otherwise, well, can I interest you in Christian Eyenga? Samardo Samuels, anyone? Manny Harris? Those three are all 21 years old, but none plays much or is regarded very highly by talent evaluators. As far as rotation players go, every relevant Cavs player except for Hickson, Gibson and Sessions is at least 26. In all likelihood, this is about as good as any of them will ever be.
That might be good enough to get them into the playoffs as a No. 8 seed if everything breaks juuuuuuuust right. That's what has to pass for hope right now.
And it may be that way for a while. Cleveland isn't particularly good, but it's also not bad enough to have a good chance at a top-3 pick in the lottery -- which is where they got lucky enough in 2003 to rebuild the franchise in a nanosecond when they won the rights to James.
The Cavs don't have a ton of cap space, although some deft dealing at the trade deadline could change that. They don't have a great shot at a high draft pick. They have very little young talent in the pipeline. And most of their rotation players are at a point in their careers where they're more likely to get worse than better.
So what should Dan do now? Cross his fingers, I guess.
I'm not sure the Cavs had a lot of choices -- gutting the roster immediately could have been a disastrous long-term decision, and this blue-collar city admires the way the remaining Cavs have picked themselves up off the floor to battle. On the other hand, the bloom of that rose will fade quickly if they're still going 30-52 with veteran-laden teams two years from now.
We're still seeing how this will play out in Cleveland, but neither path looked particularly inviting. This time, The Decision wasn't controversial, but that doesn't mean it was any less difficult.
LeBron James has disappointed in Miami, but would he eventually have grabbed a ring in Cleveland?
The only thing Ric Bucher and Chris Broussard like to do more than report on the NBA is argue about the NBA. So we decided to combine those two skills for Insider's weekly One-on-One series, in which they'll debate the hottest topics in the association.
[h3]Question: Would LeBron James have won a title in Cleveland?[/h3]
BROUSSARD: As we all know, LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers this past summer to join the Miami Heat. LeBron had one thing in mind when he did so: winning championships. I contend, however, that he would have eventually won a title even if he had stayed in Cleveland.
BUCHER: I felt that way for a long time, too, and thought he'd be best served, if nothing else, to die trying to get the Cavs their first championship. But now that I review the culture of entitlement the Cavs created, and the fact LeBron couldn't get a Chris Bosh-caliber player to move to Ohio, I'm convinced it was never going to happen for him there.
CB: There definitely was a culture of entitlement, but they won 66 and 61 games in that culture. They couldn't get over the hump, but that's often been the history of NBA legends. LeBron's path was appearing similar to Michael Jordan's, who wasn't able to get past Boston and Detroit until he was 28, and Isiah Thomas', who kept falling to the Celtics and Lakers. Boston is going to get older very soon, and so will the Lakers. And the playoff failures were only making LeBron hungrier. So, as his hunger grew, he would have been forced to keep adding to his game (post-ups, improved free throw shooting). I think he would have eventually gotten that ring in Cleveland.
RB: Not getting over the hump proved to be a problem for a lot of teams that were regular-season wonders -- that's no harbinger of eventual success. The Dallas Mavericks won 60 and 67 games in back-to-back seasons. The Sacramento Kings had four consecutive seasons with 55-plus wins, including 61 in 2001-02. The Phoenix Suns won 60-plus twice in a three-year span. None won a ring, and only the Mavs even made it to the Finals. The Orlando Magic have won 59-plus in back-to-back seasons, and they're not any closer to a ring now, even though Dwight Howard is supposedly hungrier than ever. All those teams were tragically flawed, one way or the other. All had a missing link or two in the championship formula of owner-GM-coach-star-supporting star-role players. The reason I don't think LeBron could've won a ring in Cleveland is because, as you alluded, he's seven seasons in and we're still waiting for him to be hungry enough to do whatever it takes to win one.
CB: Those teams you mentioned also never had the best or second-best player in the league. Dirk Nowitzki, Chris Webber and Steve Nash, while superstars, are not the caliber of player LeBron James is. None of the all-time greats who haven't won rings -- Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Elgin Baylor, Charles Barkley -- were ever the first or second-best player in the league for several years running. LeBron has always been mentioned in the MJ, Magic, Bird, Kobe, Oscar category -- and rightly so. All the players on that level, the players who've had that level of game, won rings, and I think LeBron would have eventually legitimized his place among that group.
RB: When it comes to talent, I'd never dispute that LeBron James is the league's most gifted player. "Best player" has a different meaning to me; in short, it's someone who knows how to utilize that talent for the purpose of winning a championship. That's where LeBron's immense talent actually creates a problem, in much the same way Tracy McGrady's did. For the Cavs -- or any team LeBron plays on -- to win a championship, that team is going to need someone to lead it, set the pace and focus on a daily basis, do whatever is necessary to utilize the team's strengths and compensate for its weaknesses. LeBron has never done any of that. Not consistently. Not at the level necessary to win a championship. That much has been exposed every postseason. He wants to have fun and play the way he wants to play. That's his right. But I can't envision a scenario in which a championship-caliber leader would have agreed to go to Cleveland just to play with him. For seven years, no one even remotely considered it. Bosh, who is merely a complementary player, wouldn't even consider it. What would have changed over the next seven years?
CB: Let's stop with the revisionist history. For the past three or four years LeBron has, without question, been the best or second-best player in the league. It's easy to criticize him now, but let's not act like he's the only superstar who's at times been difficult to deal with. Phil Jackson wrote a whole book about how tough Kobe Bryant was to handle, how selfish he was. Bill Russell often sat out practice, á la Allen Iverson. Wilt Chamberlain told his employers he'd go to either morning shootaround or the game, not both. And Shaquille O'Neal's leadership and work ethic have been questioned, too. Yet all those guys won rings. Why? Because they can ball! And LeBron can flat-out ball.
RB: I'm not sure why you immediately compare LeBron to Jordan, Russell and Wilt when his career actually hews more closely to Iverson, Vince Carter and Dirk at this point. But I'll give you Wilt, since he was, in his time, a dominant talent who won titles only when he was with a Hall of Fame leader -- Hal Greer with the Philadelphia 76ers and Jerry West with the Los Angeles Lakers -- even though, based on his talent, Wilt assuredly was expected to win more. But even to compare to Wilt at this stage, LeBron would have to win a ring this season.
CB: Fact is, the Cavs were on the rise. For the first time in LeBron's career there, they had at least some type of continuity. Rather than switching several key players every season or two as they had done in the past, the Cavs would have stability with Mo Williams in his third season in Cleveland and Anthony Parker, Antawn Jamison and presumably Shaq in their second. That added chemistry would have been huge for the Cavs, at some point big enough to get them over the hump. And if you think chemistry doesn't matter, just take a look at the Heat.
While there are no excuses for Cleveland's failure last season, the fact is that the Cavs were in a tough spot heading into the playoffs. Shaq was returning from a two-month layoff, due to injury, and had played only three games with Jamison. Having those guys together for a season and having all the players hone their chemistry would have eventually been enough for James to deliver a ring.
RB: There's been plenty of reason to criticize LeBron over the past few years. Only a few did, though, because it was easier to look at the modest bodies of work by the players around him, LeBron's tremendous gifts and terrific statistics and place blame for any failure elsewhere first. Besides, it was Cleveland! What had that organization ever done? The general thinking was that LeBron was the only thing that it had going for it, and he was making some Herculean effort to make them what they were. What the move to Miami has exposed, however, are not just the fundamental flaws in his game but in his mindset. The Cavs were a great regular-season team because Mike Brown was a great defensive coach and LeBron, if you didn't have time to game plan for him, was an offensive handful. But their focus on a night-to-night basis wavered, as did LeBron's, and they paid the price for that every year in the playoffs.
Jamison is in his 12th season; Williams and Parker are in their seventh; Shaq is lucky to get through a season -- these are the guys who would've improved to make the Cavs better than the Lakers or Celtics this season? I suppose if you started from scratch with a rookie LeBron and held him accountable and built your team on championship principles rather than on what would appease him and didn't operate in fear of your cash cow leaving every three years, the Cavs might've won a ring eventually. But working off the culture created during LeBron's first seven years? I don't know of a hazmat company in the world up to that decontamination task.
