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Tag: Cleveland Cavaliers (Page 22 of 53)
Heading into this year’s playoffs, the conventional wisdom was that if the Cavs won a title, or at least made it to the Finals, LeBron James would likely re-sign to continue his quest for a championship. But if the Cavs suffered another pre-Finals flame out like last year’s Eastern Conference Finals loss to the Magic, he would sign elsewhere.
Well, we all know what happened. An aging but experienced (and cohesive) Celtics team basically dismantled the Cavs in the last three games of the series. Every Celtic knew his role and team flat out executed better, both offensively and defensively.
Where does this leave LeBron? He said after the game that his team had “a plan” and was going to execute that plan. Forget the fact that a few questions before he was asked if he had a plan and answered with a resounding, “No.” Of course he has a plan. He’s being disingenuous when he says that he hasn’t thought about the different scenarios that could play out this postseason and offseason.
He’s clearly not happy with Mike Brown. And he can’t be happy with Antawn Jamison, Shaquille O’Neal or even Mo Williams, who scored well in Game 6, but was very up and down in the series. Shaq won’t be back, and Brown is probably on his way out too. He had a tough task of trying to keep team cohesion with the mid-season introduction of Jamison and the late-season loss of O’Neal. But the bottom line is that over the past two seasons he’s had more talent than his opposition and hasn’t gotten it done. If Dan Gilbert thinks that firing Brown increases the possibility that LeBron will re-up, then he’ll do it in a New York minute.
Brian Windhorst, Cleveland.com: The Cavs were closer to beating the Orlando Magic last season than they were the Celtics this season. This is regression. Playing the way they did against the Bulls and the Celtics, they would not have beaten the Magic this season. Or the Lakers. Or probably the Suns. Right now the Cavs maybe, maybe are the fifth-best team in the league, and James and Shaquille O’Neal are headed for free agency. This was not the team that won 61 games, obviously. The Cavs haven’t been that team since they beat the Milwaukee Bucks and Atlanta Hawks in the first week of April to pretty much wrap up the No. 1 seed. They took the foot off the pedal after that and they never recovered. It was compounded by the fact that O’Neal didn’t return until the start of the playoffs, which had him in the starting lineup with Antawn Jamison for the first time ever and pushed a player who started 73 games in J.J. Hickson out of the rotation. Stuff like that doesn’t just happen and everything is OK, there’s damage from those types of changes. With a couple exceptions, when frankly they just got red hot shooting the ball, the Cavs were a shell of themselves in the playoffs. Some of it was rhythm. Some of it was effort, actually a lot of it was effort. Some of it was chemistry problems. Some of it was coaching. Some of it was the opponents they were playing. The Celtics were masterful. Guess what? The Magic would have been even tougher.
Terry Pluto, Cleveland Plain Dealer: Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has to be distraught by watching his team lose their last two home games by a combined 50 points to Boston. He watched his team being out-hustled, out-rebounded and out-defended by the Celtics, who averaged 100 points per game in this series. It was the Cavs who were supposed to be a physical, gritty team. It was Brown who was supposed to prepare the Cavs to win in the postseason. It was James who was supposed to finally win a championship in his seventh year in Cleveland. All of it is gone in less than a week. Brown has done an admirable job in his five seasons. But since reaching the 2007 finals, the Cavs have been eliminated in the Eastern Conference finals in 2009, and been knocked out twice by Boston in the second round (2008, 2010). Gilbert bought this team to win a title. He knows that James is The Franchise, and James has said he’ll make his decision on where to sign as a free agent this summer based on where he has the best chance to win. While not criticizing his coach, James also has not offered much public support for Brown. That could mean a coaching change with the Cavs.
Last year, after losing to the Orlando Magic, LeBron served up this gem when asked why he didn’t shake hands with the Magic:
“I’m a winner. It’s not being a poor sport or anything like that. If somebody beats you up, you’re not going to congratulate them. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m a competitor. That’s what I do. It doesn’t make sense for me to go over and shake somebody’s hand.”
Um, LeBron, I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s exactly what being a poor sport means.
On Wednesday, when asked if he was disappointed in his brutal performance in Game 5, he said the this:
“Me? Personally?” he said. “Nah, I’m not disappointed. I’m never disappointed in my play. I feel like I could do more, but I’m not disappointed at all.”
Sorry to pull the dictionary out here, but this is what Merriam-Webster has to say about the word disappoint.
to fail to meet the expectation or hope of
In other words, if you think you could do more, then you failed to meet your own expectations, and you are therefore disappointed.
Now, no one says that you have to wallow in that disappointment, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are at some point disappointed with your own play. LeBron said himself that he is never disappointed in his own play. That’s impossible.
This reminds me of that line from “The Princess Bride,” when Inigo Montoya is talking to Vizzini and the latter says his favorite word: “Inconceivable!”
Montoya’s response?
Photo from fOTOGLIF
John Hollinger re-watched Game 5 and wrote a good piece about what may be going on with LeBron James. (Insider subscription required.)
James couldn’t make a jump shot. He tried 11 jumpers and made only one of them. Every miss was short — most of them well short — and a couple drifted off to the right. I suppose this could have happened just by chance, but a far more likely cause is that his elbow was bothering his shot.
I counted several others in which James had a clear opening for the jumper and turned it down. One could argue this was a reaction to his cold shooting, but that has never stopped him before. Instead, I would surmise that he knew his elbow limited his effectiveness as a jump shooter.
We have one other data point to support us: his track record in this series. Since Game 5 of the Chicago series, James’ effectiveness has correlated directly with how much rest he had between games.
Witness: Games 2, 4 and 5 came with just one day of rest; in those three, he shot 0-for-13 on 3s and 17-for-47 overall. Games 1 and 3, on the other hand, had an extra day of rest beforehand, which seemed to allow his elbow to feel much better: In those two contests, he was a one-man wrecking crew, making 26 of 46 shots from the floor and scoring 73 points. Needless to say, those were the two Cleveland wins in this series.
What it all means for the Cavs is rather worrisome because Thursday’s must-win Game 6 (8 p.m. ET, ESPN) comes on one day’s rest again.
If rest is the key for LeBron, he’s going to have a tough time performing well in Game 6, and that gives the Celtics the advantage. It’s funny — heading into these playoffs everyone thought that a grizzled Boston team would play better with more rest, but with LeBron’s injury, the opposite seems to be true, at least in this series.
Photo from fOTOGLIF
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