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| Cartoon by Nashnal Baskitbel Asosiashin |
FOR a purveyor of all things failure, it doesn’t get much better than the tire fire that is the Cleveland Cavaliers organization. The Cadavers rose from the dead to defeat the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night for their first win of the season, which came under the watch of interim head coach Larry Drew … except that he’s not the interim head coach, he’s the … uh …
Uh, okay, so, that’s a little weird. But these are the Cavs, where everything has been a little weird even in the best of times. Having LeBron James on your roster will do that. In the end, he wins titles and conference finals and what have you, but he also tends to bring drama, melodrama, and soap opera to the proceedings as well. But now that LeBron has taken his talents and accompanying theatrics to the South Bay, Cleveland has descended into farce.
And it wasn’t hard to see this coming – or, at least, it shouldn’t have been, but everyone involved with the Cavs has been delusional. You can see how something like this occurs, of course – it’s very easy, when you reach the pinnacle, to forget how and why it was that you got there in the first place. It’s easy to overinflate your own accomplishments and contributions, and think you’re better than you are. To that end, the Cavs doubled down this offseason, believing that even with LeBron’s departure, they could compete for the playoffs this season.
They cannot.
Let’s be honest here. The Cavaliers won a championship and reached four straight finals because they had LeBron. At no point, during any of those four years, were they ever any good as a team without LeBron on the floor – not even when they still had Kyrie Irving on their team. Since taking over the helm in Jan. 2016, Ty Lue’s record in games where LeBron didn’t play was 1-12. LeBron is the system – or, at least, he was.
Oh, I should update that stat. Including the first six games of this season, none of which the Cavaliers won, Ty Lue’s record without #23 in the lineup was 1-18. Lue’s firing after six games seemed, at first glance, to be something of a mercy kill. The guy was so miserable on the sidelines last season that he needed to take several weeks off to get his health back. Since it’s impossible to judge anything that took place in Cleveland outside of a LeBron-related context, I honestly have no idea whether or not he’s a good coach. He did, however, succeed at keeping the peace during that time, and man management skills are often far more important than acumen with X’s and O’s when it comes to coaching professional athletes. But it’s hard to know how well Lue would have handled going through a long rebuilding process in Cleveland.
But it would have helped, of course, if Lue’d known he was in for a rebuild from the start, which would have required everyone involved acknowledging, on the 1st of July, that the roster was garbage. Instead, everyone from the top down, starting with owner Comic Sans Dan Gilbert and GM Koby Altman, were insisting that the Cavs were going to try and compete for a playoff spot in the East. Sure, LeBron is gone, but we’ve got winners here! We’re smart! We don’t need LeBron! All for one and one for all …
… which lasted all of two games, as the Cavs got roasted in both, at which point a schism developed between Lue and Altman, with Lue wanting to play the vets who’d won him a title in 2016, while Altman wanted Lue to play the younger guys – “younger” meaning all of the guys who came to the Cavs after Altman took over as GM, a bunch of whom showed up at the trade deadline and none of whom contributed much of anything to the Cavs’ playoff run last spring because, well, because they aren’t very good. No one on this team is any good, save for Kevin Love, on whom Altman tacked a 4/$120m extension ostensibly in the hopes of making him potentially more tradable down the line, which seems risky since Love is constantly hurt. Maybe there’s a market for 30-somethings being paid 30-something million dollars, but I don’t know where that market is. And besides, if you are trying to be good, why is it a good idea to make your best player more marketable to other teams? And if you suck, you probably have to eat that deal. This makes no sense. Then again, nothing Cleveland does makes any sense.
Anyway, after two depressing losses to start the season, when the reality settled in that the Cavs are gonna be awful, all of a sudden Altman wanted to pivot, play the “younger” players and bench all the old vets – which Lue did, with predictable results, because the “younger” players aren’t any good, and while the vets aren’t any good, either, they’re prideful people who have accomplished some stuff alongside LeBron in recent years and getting benched didn’t go over so well. So this experiment went predictably badly, at which point Lue just decided to give his bosses the finger, reversing course yet again and sticking his vets out there on the floor and basically daring Altman to fire him for his insubordination – which Altman promptly did.
This was well played by Lue. He’s got a championship ring and three straight trips to the Finals on his résumé – a résumé which will now also be absent the 55-60 losses his now former team is going to amass this season. While I still don’t know just how good of a coach Lue actually is, those credentials are shiny enough that he’ll probably get another gig. And after stepping in back in Jan. 2016 as the interim head coach and guiding Cleveland to a championship, Lue parlayed this success into a 5/$35m contract, which means that Comic Sans Dan is still on the hook for $15-$20m to Lue, who can take some time and get his health back and be choosy about his next job, resting easy while sleeping on a pile of Dan Gilbert’s dollars. This also adds to a rather astonishingly large graveyard of dead money on the Cavaliers books:
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| from Joe Vardon, The Athletic Cleveland |
Now, to give Comic Sans Dan some credit here for a moment, he has been willing to spend to win, unlike some other stints around the league. The Cavs have carried some of the highest payrolls in NBA history in recent years, contracts which were doled out to the likes of JR Smith and Tristan Thompson and so forth who filled legit, specific needs on a LeBron-led team – which is what you should do, because the chance to win is so fleeting. But one way or another, the bill winds up coming due. Part of the problem now for the Cavs is that all of those one-time useful role players are now, post-23, little more than big-numbered bad contracts.
But Comic Sans Dan has now also churned through 7 coaches and 5 GMs during the time he’s owned this team, and that sort of constant tumult and turmoil makes for some damn near impossible working conditions. Even when things have gone well, behind the scenes, everyone is mad at each other all the time. Bad ownership is an incredible competitive disadvantage. The only way to overcome that is if a miracle occurs – which is precisely what once happened in Cleveland. The Cavaliers ultimately won a championship because it just so happened they won the draft lottery and the greatest player of his generation happened to be born in neighboring Akron and feel an affinity for the place. (Actually, two of the greatest players were born in Akron, but I digress.) It has nothing to do with Comic Sans Dan’s acumen as an entrepreneur. They won championships and won all of those games in spite of him.
Everyone involved in this mess is fooling themselves. Top 5 Reasons why the Cavs won an NBA title: 1. LeBron, 2. LeBron, 3. LeBron, 4. Kyrie made a great shot in Game 7 of the finals, 5. LeBron. Every single thing about this organization sans LeBron is sub-replacement level, at best.
And now they’ve turned it over to interim coach … uh, “voice” Larry Drew, who doesn’t want to be leading this death march through the rest of the season unless he’s paid more, and is letting everyone know it. That said, he says he won’t step down from his assistant coach job, which means he’s basically doing the job anyway, so I’m not exactly sure how much leverage he has – if someone’s doing the job by proxy and not getting paid for it, why pay them? So you now have a coach who isn’t the coach, coaching a team that isn’t much of a team given the rancor and the discord. JR wants to be traded – hell, everyone wants to be traded – but there are no realistic trades that do not involve the Cavs taking on bad money in return, Kevin Love is out for at least a month, the Cavs got destroyed by Denver last night and are 1-7 despite a friendly, home-heavy schedule, and about the best they can hope for is being so bad that their Top-10 protected first round pick doesn’t wind up conveying to the Atlanta Hawks next summer. And sure, there is always some bad luck in this kind of thing, but at the same time, once LeBron left this team, the pivot to a rebuild should have been immediate, but that would have required everyone to actually have some self-awareness.
(Oh, look, now we have an age discrimination lawsuit. The hits just keep on coming.)
And this is hard to watch, because when they weren’t all bickering behind the scenes and actually took to the floor, the LeBron-led Cavs played some incredible basketball. When they were dialed in, they could be truly great. But now the Cleveland Cavaliers are such a mess that they’ve somehow rendered the hapless Browns – who have finally decided that Hue Jackson, he of the 3-36-1 record as head coach, didn’t know what he was doing – not even the most incompetent franchise in the city. This might be, at the moment, the single-most dysfunctional franchise in all of professional sports – although the Minnesota Timberwolves still might have something to say about that, and LeBron is well on his way to getting another coach fired in one of the least-surprising developments of this still-young NBA season, but I’m waiting for the next plot twists in those soap operas. Tune in next week for another episode of As The Stomach Turns …
