Lingering Items--Chutes and Ladders Edition

Usually I end my Lingering Items columns with a question to ponder but today I flip the conceit: Are sports fans in general cynical or is it just Cleveland sports fans?

Though I don’t usually weigh in on the answer but ask because I'm concerned.  About me, about you about the nature of sports in Cleveland generally. I had just finished writing my once or twice a year column on the Cleveland Cavaliers and decided to let it sit for a few days.  Something about it didn’t seem quite right.  When I returned to it, the problem became clear.  It seemed to be drenched in a baseline cynicism that can best be summed up as “the Cavs suck, what’s new?”  That really wasn’t what I intended to say.  Thus beget the question to ponder and then another, more existential variation: did I have anything more to say about Cleveland sports that I hadn’t already said?

At that moment, the answer was “no.”  I seemed to be saying “of course the Cavs need to fire Byron Scott because, well, it’s just their turn in the barrel.  This is Cleveland and this is how we roll.  The Browns and Indians have just done another in their various yet endless resets and so it just stands to reasons that the Cavs are now on the clock.”

It’s almost beside the point that on some level it happens to be true.  What I was really dealing with was not the quixotic attempt to find a different angle to the same ol’ same ol’ but a better way of talking about what really is interesting to me about the fact that the Cavs do need to fire Scot.

Let me deal with the Cavs for a moment in the form of a casual observer, which I am not.  It’s true that I don’t write much about the Cavs, but there are two reasons for it.  First, there are many better suited to school you on the nuances of just how lousy the team plays defense.  Second,  I don’t find the NBA a particularly compelling form of professional sports entertainment.  The individual games, especially when played by third tier teams, are about as meaningful as a Pringles commercial.  If the Cavs beat Orlando by 10 or lose to them by 20, it means nothing except in the race for ping pong balls.

But what is compelling about them and hence what makes me far more than just casual about them (and the town’s other two teams) is the inexorable journey they’re on as they try to become relevant in a sport that seems more relevant to a billion Chinese then a 100 million Americans.  Indeed if I had to really ferret out exactly what interests me about sports in general, it’s that journey and all the various missteps that are taken along the way.

When I consider that context, I realize that I’m not particularly cynical about sports or even Cleveland sports because after all these years the results hardly matter.  What I am cynical about is the ability of those that control Cleveland sports to do the right thing when it comes to navigating the path from the outhouse to the penthouse.  It’s not exactly like I need to go chapter and verse on each of the teams in this town but I will if you dare me to.   Until then, suffice it to say that no matter how many days and weeks and months and years seem to pass the ability of any Cleveland team to build itself into a winner always seems fanciful.  It’s like the fans are stuck playing an endless game of chutes and ladders except that the team rarely finds a ladder but always lands on the chutes and usually the one that takes you not just one or two rows back but the one that takes you all the way back to the beginning.

And so it is with these Cavs at these moments.  They have cap space.  They have one verifiable talent and they have one incredibly bored fan base.  Is it right to hold only Scott accountable for it?  Of course not.  But it’s not right to give him a pass, either.  Let's look at what's really driving the conclusion.

**

The Cavs are approaching Ted Stepien-era level futility and it’s not as if the fans aren’t noticing.  The shine of LeBron James’ reign here has long since dissipated and so too has the insane promise owner Dan Gilbert made that the Cavs will win a championship before the James-led Miami Heat.  The truth is that the Cavs won’t even make the playoffs before the James-led Heat win their third or fourth championship.

The reason that the Cavs are a futile, boring, mind-numbing mess has something to do with Scott, something, maybe more, to do with the front office and plenty to do with the NBA.  Let’s take it in order.

Scott is starting to feel some pressure, finally, from the media and the fans and you can tell the crisp collars on his dress shirts are feeling a bit tight these days.  Frankly I’ve not seen the media give a bigger pass to a head coach since Eric Wedge was manipulating the Indians’ starting lineup on a nightly basis.  Indeed the Wedge comparison is most apt.  The local media gave Wedge a pass even though he was a mostly ineffective micromanager mostly because the Indians were terrible and who was managing or mismanaging the lousy product the front office was putting out there seemed almost irrelevant.  The same holds true for Scott I suppose.

The Indians’ front office seemed to notice that Wedge wasn’t wearing any clothes right about the time it became clear that Wedge didn’t have the ability or temperament to develop young players.  By comparison, the series of nitwits the Browns have hired as their head coach have garnered far greater scrutiny and given far less rope than the Indians gave Wedge or that the Cavs, at the moment, are giving Scott. But should Scott really enjoy the freedom to underperform night in and night out?  It may not be fair to judge the team in terms of wins and losses because their talent is so far inferior to the better clubs in the league.  But it is fair to judge them by intensity and effort and on this score even Scott has noted several times this season (and last year) that too often the team doesn’t seem interested in competing.

I’ll take his word because he’s closest to it but even from the cheap seats and my outdated overstuffed leather recliner there’s no reason to argue the point.  Scott told the Plain Dealer last Thursday that he’s aware of the muted rumors about his job and he didn’t have much to say about them, except that in not saying much he said plenty.  He pointed out that injuries and an overall lack of talent have kept him from fielding a competitive team.  All true.  Yet, curiously, he said that if he had to grade his own performance, he’d give himself a “C.”  Maybe he was being self-deprecating, but can that be true if the grade is correct?  This team has been playing out the string for most of the season and by playing out the string I mean going through the motions, giving half effort and generally hoping to get through the game unscathed and to dinner before the restaurants close.

It may not be Scott’s responsibility to acquire the players and I won’t blame him for the horrid roster.  But I will blame him for an almost complete inability to reach these players in a way that at least guarantees a team that’s willing to fight for a win 82 times a season.

If there is such a thing as coaching out the string, Scott is doing it.  He seems to alternate between being lost and being uninterested.  If your life depended on your ability to name one positive thing Scott has brought to this franchise, particularly this season, could you do it?  I couldn’t.

I’m not even sure Scott is actually a lousy head coach.  But I am sure he’s a lousy head coach of a team with lousy talent.  I don’t know what exactly Scott works on with his team in practice but the results aren’t impressive.  The young talent under him hasn’t developed either technically or professionally.  What is apparent is that he hasn’t instilled in them the work ethic they’ll need to better compete.

It would be interesting I suppose to see what Scott could do with a talented roster, but there’s no reason to give him that chance in Cleveland.  By his own admission he’s done just an average job.  Is that really the kind of coach owner Dan Gilbert wants for his team?  Would he tolerate “C” level performance in any other part of his organization?

**
The front office is more than culpable in this mess, maybe more than Scott.  The roster they have compiled is not particularly interesting save for Kyrie Irving.  It's a mish mash mostly of spare parts and projects.  It's compiled that way I suppose in order to retain a mythical flexibility for some future point when they'll spend that flexibility like drunken sailors at a strip club.

What too of its decision to hire Scott in the first place?  He had an impressive resume as a player but to call his resume mixed at the time the Cavs hired him is being generous.  After a rough first year, he had a very successful two year run with New Jersey.  Then the team stopped listening to him and he didn't make it through what was turning into a miserable fourth year.  Since then he's mostly found himself coaching at the bottom tier of the league.  It's true that the New Orleans Hornets made the playoffs twice under him, most of the time they were near the bottom of the standings.

In other words, Scott's resume reads like the resume of a typical journeyman head coach in any sport.  He's Bobby Valentine without the fake mustache and glasses.  What makes his hiring curious is that Gilbert had to sign off on it and did so knowing that there wasn't anything particularly compelling about Scott as a head coach.  You could argue that the most distinguishing thing about his career is that shortly after realizing any level of success his employers were quick to fire him thereafter almost as if they couldn't wait to rid themselves of him. The other thing that was more than clear though, which makes his hiring even more strange, is that he has virtually no record of actually developing a young roster.

So it's not a surprise the Scott is on the edge of losing another job when you consider his history.  But the thing to worry about is now the  “when” of the Scott issue but the “what happens next?” issue that follows.  This same front office that's put together a middling roster while keeping its powder dry for a mythical future it can only describe in mystical terms is the same front office that hired Scott and the same front office that will hire his replacement. Does that inspire confidence that they'll get it right?  Should it?

These are the questions Gilbert ought to be asking because while it was always taken as hurt feelings his boast about the Cavs' near term fortunes vs. the Heat's, what will not be taken is a long walk through the desert without a canteen of water in sight.  Gilbert has a record of accomplishment in most of his business dealings but right now he's failing not just the fans or the team, but himself.

**
Finally, let's talk about the NBA as an entity.  The cycling through of lousy season after lousy season, the revolving door of marginal talent, the constant lottery picks, the wheeling and dealing, the saving of cap space on the if-come are all part of the 10-year cycle of team’s that occupy the outer boroughs of the NBA.

I’ve written about this before but it bears mentioning again that the NBA statistics are as iron clad on this fact as any other sports statistic you’re likely to see:  when a team hits the skids it takes at least 10 years to get back to any level of respectability.  So the fact that the Cavs are in this hellish cycle of dread isn’t really a surprise.  Nor is the fact that this team is still several years away from legitimately competing.

Gilbert certainly is aware of this and while not completely powerless to do anything about it, he's going to have to do more then just look engaged. He has to demand more from the basketball people, including the head coach, brought in to steady the ship.  The NBA deck is stacked against bad teams and the only way out is to hope that the ping pong balls bounce your ways more than a few times in a row.  Teams like the Cavs need to consistently pick in the top 5 every year until they get good enough to get the hell out of the lottery.  In the meantime they have to find other ways to supplement the roster so that when they graduate from the lottery they don’t get stuck too long in the next inner ring of hell occupied by teams just good enough to squeak into the playoffs but not good enough to make a legitimate run.

Fans will get excited the next time the Cavs make the playoffs, which is about 5 years away by my calculations or longer if the team is unable to hold onto Irving because he, like James, sees greener pastures in warmer climates.  But at some point the team will squeak into the playoffs and after the initial fun of it wears off two years in the Cavs will have to do something dramatic to get into the better neighborhoods.  That’s the time when saving all that salary cap money will especially come in handy.  Again, though, assuming the NBA history holds true (and in few if any cases hasn’t it held true) the Cavs are at least 7 years and probably two or three head coaches away from facing that dilemma.

**

So let me end this interminably lengthy column with one final question to ponder: Given what you know about the process, can you ever actually imagine a scenario where James leaves Miami after the 2014 season to come back to Cleveland?

Lingering Items--Clueless Edition

It’s hard to know exactly what to call the NFL “situation” at the moment. The players and their union walked away from the bargaining table last Friday at 4 p.m. so that their lawyers could decertify the NFLPA as a union and then a handful of players could turn around and sue their employers for anti-trust violations. On the heels of those activities came the NFL owners’ move to then lock them out, although since there is no union it’s really unclear what a lockout could actually mean in practical terms.

Nonetheless, this hasn’t and won’t stop the inevitable public relations war over the hearts and minds of the fans, as if swaying the fans one way or the other will help determine the outcome of this dispute.

To the owners’ credit, they aren’t much acting like the fans view of this matters all that much. In that they’re just being honest. To the owners, this is a high stakes game that will in large part determine the value of the multi-million dollar investment they call a football franchise. Sure the revenues getting split up are provided directly and indirectly by the fans, but they know that alienating the customer base in an industry like this isn’t all that relevant of a concern. The fans will return when football resumes. They always do.

The players, on the other hand, seem to think that influencing fans will make a difference. If you’re a fan of Twitter and have any inclination whatsoever to follow the literally hundreds of pro football players with Twitter accounts, you’ll see an amazing consistency in their recent messages: “fans, we feel your pain.”

There is almost no scenario where the players will ever feel the fans’ pain. The disconnect between those who play our professional sports and the people that watch them has never been greater than it is now. It’s not just the money players make, though that’s a big part of it. It’s also the way players conduct their lives. Everything about what most of them do away from the field is designed to keep the barrier between them and the public impenetrable.

But to further the myth anyway, there was Drew Brees, a nice guy, a good quarterback but a clueless businessman, taking an unfortunate and ill-informed shot at the owners’ last offer. He claimed it was all for show, whatever that means.

In truth, the owners presented a very comprehensive, very serious offer to the players. Maybe it wasn’t acceptable because it still involved givebacks on revenues, but to essentially call it meaningless isn’t helpful, particularly when the union hasn’t yet produced for public consumption any of the proposals they’ve made.

There’s actually a reason for this. The union hasn’t made a single serious proposal throughout the negotiations. All they’ve done is respond to what the owners have proposed with a loud and resounding “no” each and every time. They’ve shown little interest in solving the problems presented but great interest in sounding like they are being abused in the process.

What’s really stopping these two sides from solving their problems is that they can’t even agree there’s a problem to solve. The players only want the gravy train to continue unabated. The owners, who actually are the businessmen in the room, see a future where the train has a little less gravy. Until the union accepts the fact that the owners believe there is a problem to solve, the standoff will continue and no amount of quips or tweets or ill-informed opinions by players like Brees is going to change that.

It may be that the owners were spoiling for a lockout all along. But the way the union negotiated with them, it’s pretty clear that they also got what they wanted, a chance to litigate in what is surely a dead-end strategy.

**


There was a letter to the editor in Wednesday’s Akron Beacon Journal that essentially called Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel the “shame of Ohio.” Well, if his misdeeds are the worst shame visited upon Ohio, then we’re in pretty good shape. But I’ve taken a look at the budget deficit in Ohio and the proposed method of solving it and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.

On the day that letter appeared also came the story that the Indiana Department of Labor had concluded their investigation into the death of Notre Dame student Declan Sullivan, who was sent atop a hydraulic lift in winds gusting up to 60 miles per hour last October by Notre Dame football coach Brian Kelly to film practice, only to have that lift tumble over and crush him.

The Indiana Department of Labor concluded that “the evidence overwhelming demonstrated that the university made a decision to utilize its scissor lifts in known adverse weather conditions.” For that Notre Dame was given a “knowing” citation and fined a mere $77,500, or about $172,500 less than Ohio State fined Tressel for not being forthcoming about a couple of emails.

What’s most telling about the Notre Dame situation is that this knowing violation didn’t just occur on Kelly’s watch, it occurred with his direct involvement. Kelly knew the weather was bad. Kelly allowed the student to ascend on that lift anyway and Kelly didn’t order him back down, despite the worsening weather.

In fact, the weather that particular day last October was severe over a very wide swath, including Columbus, Ohio. Tressel, the so-called shame of Ohio, confronted that same situation on that same day. Responding generally to a question about the severe weather (and before anyone knew of Sullivan’s death) Tressel told the media that he purposely didn’t ask his student videographers to use the hydraulic lift that day because it was far too windy. Indeed, he talked about how he worried about their safety. Shameful, I know.

Declan Sullivan lost his life because Kelly didn’t harbor those same concerns. And for that, no one, but no one, is calling for Kelly’s dismissal or calling him the shame of Indiana or South Bend or even just Notre Dame.

The point, I think, is not so much that Kelly is a bad guy because he isn’t. He’s a decent and honorable man, like Tressel. But the consequence of his inaction on that day cost a student his life. The consequence of Tressel’s inaction, at best, was the delay in an investigation over whether a couple of star players traded body art for pieces of memorabilia that they owned.

See, this is what happens when we knee-jerk our reactions to situations that are more complicated than can fit into the scroll at the bottom of ESPN. Perspective is lost and easy answers are demanded. But the easy answers aren’t always the right answers. I’m not suggesting that Notre Dame should fire Kelly but if there’s a coach that should be, he sure would be a more viable candidate than Tressel.

**


Speaking of items in the local newspaper, you had to really admire Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Byron Scott’s public trashing of his team following practice on Tuesday. Essentially Scott questioned their commitment and their heart. The story didn’t get much play because Scott has been saying the same things all season.

The fascinating angle to all of this is not Scott’s candor but the fact that Scott sees nothing wrong with essentially admitting that his players have all but tuned him out.

Generally speaking when the players stop listening to the coach it’s time to fire the coach. It’s a little too early in Scott’s tenure to run down that rabbit hole, but it’s not too early to suggest that the problem lies more with Scott than the ragged group of players that the Cavs currently have on the roster.

Scott’s right that professional basketball players need to take their jobs seriously. They need to come to work every day prepared to give their best efforts and they need to approach each game with a winner’s attitude. But if the players on this team are lacking any of those qualities at the moment it’s not because they never had them. It’s because they see the situation as hopeless.

Part of that is the lousy roster. Part of that is the lousy coach.

Scott can continue to try and berate his charges into compliance but there’s no reason to think that saying these same things in the same way is going to have any different effect. Getting better players will help, but even then questions about Scott’s own leadership need to be answered.

I know that fans like a passionate coach, someone willing to get in the face of a player and tell him when he’s screwing up. Fans like that because they see that in the movies and it seems to work when someone is writing the script.

But truthfully it doesn’t work any better on the basketball court then it does in any other workplace. Employees don’t appreciate being berated in private let alone in public. It has everything to do with knowing that the coach doesn’t have their backs. Say what you will about former Indians manager Eric Wedge or former Browns head coaches Romeo Crennel or Eric Mangini, but one thing none of them ever did was call out a player or the team like that publicly. Not once.

This is a lesson that Scott hasn’t yet learned, despite all his travels. Indeed, maybe that’s why he’s had so many travels in the first place and why Cleveland will likely just be another quick stop on his long journey to nowhere.

**

With the NCAA tournament starting this week, does it make you nervous, karma-wise, that LeBron James picked Ohio State to win the national championship?

The Way the Stern Wind Blows

The Cleveland Cavaliers continue to reach lower and lower lows and yet everyone associated with it, players, management, fans, are all collectively Charlie Sheen: unable to admit that there is no place left to go because rock bottom has long since been reached.

But even if they could, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway. Whereas knowing when you’ve bottomed out with the bottle may be the first step toward recovering, knowing when you’ve bottomed out in the NBA is irrelevant. The deck is stacked against you institutionally and short of a fortuitous ping pong ball or a warm weather climate with a vibrant night life, NBA riches will remain elusive.

The Cavs may not win again this season and that’s the least snarky comment that can be made about this team right now. This team had its courage, its will, its fight removed a few months back when LeBron James visited the Q and took with him all that remained of the Cavs team he once helped take to the NBA finals.

But even without that dispiriting loss, the only place the Cavs were going was to the lottery anyway. What then to do with the rest of the basketball season? Is it time for an insurrection? Is it time to reconsider our thoughts on the relatively bankrupt operations that the Browns and the Indians have become in light of how the Cavs are operating at the moment? Or should we just do what we do in Cleveland and bend over, take another swat to the ass from Niedermeyer and then say “thank you, sir, may have another?”

Honestly, is there really anything else to do? If we want to go down the usual Elisabeth Kubler-Ross steps of the grieving process, we’re long past denial. The franchise as fans knew it from the last 7 years is indeed dead. Dozens of mind-numbing double digit losses this season have driven that point home.

That takes us to the blame portion of the program. But where to start or, more appropriately, where to focus? There’s no real reason to blame Silent Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers owner, who mostly expresses his thoughts these days in 140 characters or less via Twitter. Gilbert understandably went all in on James so it’s not a surprise the Cavs would have regressed. You play no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em and put everything at stake hoping to draw to an inside straight, it’s going to cost you more times than not. Casinos are built on suckers who play those odds.

Besides, Gilbert’s sin at the moment stems from his lack of leadership during the biggest crisis facing the franchise, not the fact that he made the bet that everyone asked him to make. Move on.

There’s also no real reason to blame head coach Byron Scott, although he’s been nothing short of a disaster as a head coach. His coaching is random. He admitted to testing his players during a crucial moment in a recent game the Cavs were competitive in late with a play they hadn’t run since training camp. No one knew what the heck he was talking about. Not surprisingly, that infuriated the mercurial Scott without him ever realizing how bizarre his rant actually made him sound.

Still, Phil Jackson couldn’t make this Cavs team competitive apparently, not with all the middling talent on this roster. Injured or healthy, nothing much would change its fortunes in the short term. Again, move on.

If we’re going to stay mired in the blame game for now then let’s be fair and honest about where it really lies and that’s with the NBA and its benevolent dictator David Stern. It’s not that Stern let James pull the rug out from under the Cavs feet that’s the problem. He couldn’t have stopped it because it was already too late anyway. Rather the crux of the issue is that Stern, for all his grand visions for the future and the brand, couldn’t see the problems staring him in the face before it came to fruition to the detriment of Cleveland.

If there is one truism in running a for-profit enterprise it is this: you can never get yourself in a position where the inmates run the asylum. Any business of any sort that gets itself in a position where an individual’s presence or absence can send it into complete irrelevance overnight usually gets what it deserves in the end.

Scour the NBA at the moment and it’s very clear that Stern’s vision of the game has put the league in a position where the value of a franchise can plummet faster than the stock market after a terrorist attack. It’s really rather simple. The owners are the pawns and the players control all. It’s a Through-the Looking-Glass existence that puts the power in the hands of players (and their agents) to manipulate the lengths of their contracts in order to expire together at more desirable locations where the weather suits their fancy. You wouldn’t run the local deli this way but the NBA has allowed itself to turn basic business principles on its ear so that James, Wades and Boshes of the world can hold a franchise hostage as each of them did with their teams this summer and as Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard are doing now.

It’s the byproduct, really, of Stern’s view that the league prospers best when it has superstars to market. Perhaps it does if the goal is to sell jerseys to the Chinese, but as it’s playing out in real time it’s probably the worst business plan imaginable.

Maybe it’s fun to see billionaire owners squirm like pre-school girls eyeing a dead bird on the playground, but the reality is that by catering more to the egos of the superstars the NBA and Stern have left the owners, you know, the guys footing all the bills, holding the bag when those player egos naturally grow out of control.

The Cavs are a franchise that despite Gilbert’s hubris are not going to recover from this for years and then only when a superstar happens to fall into their laps again through the luck of the ping pong balls. How is Minnesota doing these days without Kevin Garnett? How about Indiana since the departure of Reggie Miller? How about Milwaukee, since, well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left? You get the point.

When the superstar escapes by whatever means from the team that was lucky enough to be in a position to draft him, the franchise just doesn’t recover until the next superstar comes along. It really is that simple.

Cleveland, if you want your future, it’s already been played out, a short plane ride away, in Chicago. In the 1997-98 season, the Chicago Bulls won 62 games and a NBA title. It was also Michael Jordan’s and Scottie Pippen’s last season with the team. It took the Bulls nearly four full seasons to win 62 more games total. They didn’t have a winning record until 7 years after Jordan left. In the 6 seasons after that they had only two winning seasons and three seasons where they finished a .500. Only since Derek Rose fell in their laps have the Bulls had a chance to start climbing from the abyss. Gee, it only took 12 years for that to happen.

If David Stern doesn’t see this as the issue holding back the NBA and make it the centerpiece of their upcoming negotiations, then he is in far deeper denial than is Gilbert about what it will take to rebuild the Cavs. Right now the players and the agents have pushed the league into a system that is working counter to the greater good of the league in favor of the greater good of a handful of players and a handful of franchises.

Either Stern takes this issue on now or abdicates it forever. It starts with a hard salary cap and a NFL-like way to put tags on certain players in order to keep them with their current teams. It ends with the notion that overnight no franchise can see its value plunge 35%, like the Cavs this season, just because one player leaves town. If that scenario remains viable, less and less owners will be willing to lay their money down.

To this point there hasn’t been much talk either way on what Stern really thinks. But if you’re watching in Cleveland, just know that the difference between losing for the next generation or so depends on which way the Stern wind decides to blow.

Silent Dan

It used to be easy to a Dan Gilbert fan. How could it not be? The owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers was a do-something person with a history of success. Besides, compared to the owners of the other two professional teams in town, Gilbert is number one almost by default.

Gilbert got an undeserved reputation early on in his career as a NBA owner as being meddlesome. To the contrary, he came across as a committed owner willing to approach his franchise not like a toy but like another critical business in his empire. He recognized that his main job was to find competent people to run the basketball operations on a day to day basis and once that was accomplished he would sit back and enjoy the view from the preferred seats.

In fact that’s what Gilbert did. It helped tremendously when the ping pong balls allowed LeBron James to fall into their laps. But Gilbert then did everything he could to capitalize on that fortune. That the Cavaliers fell short wasn’t for his lack of trying.

Lately, though, Gilbert is trying the patience of even his staunchest supporters mostly because he’s no longer the Gilbert that the fans were growing to trust. At a time when the franchise is struggling to find an identity, a face, Gilbert has adopted a bunker mentality as his team embarrasses its way through the 2010-11 season.

Since the whole James fiasco, in fact, Gilbert has changed and not for the better. The same goes for the front office. Instead of being out front, it comes across as left behind. The lack of noise is deafening. Meanwhile the fans are screaming as the team is in the midst of foisting upon its fans all the history it thought had been erased once Ted Stepien sold the team to the Gund Brothers.

Maybe there isn’t much Gilbert could do anyway, but right now the Cavs are coming across as an organization that simply doesn’t care. There is no evidence at the moment that anyone is in charge. Games appear on the schedules at regular intervals and losses pile up like the snow in Chardon. You don’t even get the sense that anyone inside the Cavs front office notices, let alone sympathizes with what the fans that have to endure this disaster. If they do, they’re doing a great job at hiding their empathy.

No one expected the Cavs to compete for a NBA title this season. Indeed, the playoffs always seemed like a bit of a long shot. But right now, 15 wins doesn’t even look possible.

Injuries are hurting this team, certainly, but so too is the lack of leadership. James was every bit the straw that stirred the drink when he was in town but it’s nothing short of amazing how small his supporting cast now looks with him gone. There isn’t a leader among them, not one player willing to step forward in a meaningful way.

It would be nice to think that head coach Byron Scott could demonstrate that leadership but frankly he looks just as lost as his players. Besides, it’s not as if the players even look like their craving leadership. What they look like most, at least the ones who are suiting up, are a collection of NBA bit players trying half-heartedly to keep their skills from dulling too much before they move on to a real team as a bit part in that team’s run up to the playoffs.

There was a column in Tuesday's Plain Dealer that suggested that a Cavs rebuild is at least 10 years in the making, if teams like Chicago are any indication. Without any sort of superstar to fill their void, the Bulls post-Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were the same sort of directionless mass.

Some of that was due to the team never being truly bad enough for long enough to stockpile lottery picks. The other part of it though was due to a front office that seemed paralyzed about what direction to take. Maybe that’s the natural course of things when you’ve had the greatest basketball player in the history of the game suiting it up for you every night.

Right now a 10-year turnaround for the Cavs seems wildly optimistic and that’s why it falls to Gilbert to explain why that won't be the case. Gilbert may not realize it. He may be preoccupied with casino gambling. He may think that if he could endure the mortgage meltdown over the last few years he can endure anything. Well, welcome to Cleveland, pal. There is a malaise enshrouding this franchise and it is taking hold like a toxic mold in the basement, creeping up the walls. Cavs fans have been down this road. They know the way in their sleep.

Putting better players on the court right now isn’t going to be possible. The NBA operates under a salary structure of loosey goosey rules and exceptions that no one much understands except that the only thing really worth knowing is that teams with superstars end up being able to exploit the rules in ways that defy reason or logic while the also rans are left hamstrung by the process.

And while that will help explain the dismal product on the court at the moment, what it doesn’t explain at all is why the Cavs seem like a franchise lying back and taking it as if they have no other choice.

Every franchise is going to go through rough patches, although in Cleveland rough patches is the standard while stretches of success are the exception. The franchises that survive best are those that find ways to engage the fans as they work diligently behind the scenes to fix the problem.

I used to think of Gilbert as being that guy. I couldn’t fathom a scenario where he’d allow this asset to wallow. Instead he’s become the Dolans and Randy Lerner but with a twitter account.

For the life of me I can’t figure out why anyone these days would attend a Cavs game, even the ones that Gilbert cajoled into paying for season tickets before they knew that James would skip town. The games aren’t even competitive. The only selling point, really, is that they’re over quickly.

Next season, though, will be even worse. The season ticket base will dwindle to nothing and it wouldn’t’ surprise if the Cavs take to using curtains to shrink the size of the Q in order to make it look more crowded.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way but Gilbert’s lack of action and attention are going to have devastating consequences to this franchise unless he wakes up. There are probably worse head coaches he could have selected than Scott but it’s hard to imagine he could have picked a worse public communicator than Scott. Rarely engaging, he’s vacillates between testy and aloof. General manager Chris Grant executes his position as if he still thinks he’s just the assistant. Maybe he is.

That leaves it in Gilbert’s lap to be the face of the franchise. Instead, Gilbert has mostly disappeared from the scene and left the team and its fans to struggle to identify why exactly anyone at the moment should care. Not surprisingly, they’ve both groups have come to the same conclusion; nobody does, so why should they?

Lingering Items--Holiday Leftovers Edition

Because no one reads the morning newspaper anymore, it will probably get overlooked that the Plain Dealer on Tuesday had two items about the Cleveland Browns coming down on both sides of the debate over head coach Eric Mangini's status. One of those items in particular was probably the surest sign yet the Mangini will be back next season with the Browns and I'm not talking about Mary Kay Cabot's interviews with players who came out in support of their coach. We'll get to that in a moment.

No, the item of note was Bill Livingston's column advocating for Mangini's dismissal. It's not that Livingston added anything particularly novel or insightful to the conversation. He usually doesn't. It's just that his m.o. is to try and see which way the wind is blowing and then ride that tide, to mix my metaphors as Livingston might. The problem? He is generally wrong, a Cleveland sports writing version of George Kostanza.

But let's not get all caught up in the Livingston tea leaves. The truth is that no one knows what club president Mike Holmgren is going to do because Holmgren isn't going to talk about it for at least another week. So it's all just a guess anyway.

There are some things we do know and one is that Holmgren isn't enamored with the offensive scheme. How could he be? Another is he has an itch to coach again, mainly because that's what he's told us. Neither of those are good Mangini. We also know that Holmgren doesn't think so little of the job that Mangini has done this season to fire him before season's end. Finally we also know the bevy of statistics that show that while the Browns' record isn't better the team is improving. Both of those things are good for Mangini.

That's all just a mixed bag of items that Holmgren has rolling around inside his head at the moment. But to actually predict what Holmgren might do is a fool's game. Even weighing in on it at this point is getting pretty old. It's just finding new ways to say the same things to back up the opinion you formed long ago.

But if there really is a new item to add to the mix it was Cabot's item (along with a similar item in the Akron Beacon Journal) about the number of players coming out strongly supporting their coach. That would seem like a good thing.

To throw a little cold water on this show of support, just know that this kind of thing isn't unusual, in the abstract. In any locker room there are going to be players who like their coach, either because the coach brought those players in and gave them a chance others didn't or because they just generally like the guy. For those players it's easy to talk on the record.

On the other side of the locker room are going to be players who feel wronged by that coach for their own self-serving reasons. Maybe they feel like they weren't given a fair chance to prove themselves. Maybe they just don't like the cut of the coach's jib. Those players usually don't talk on the record.

All that said, it's still meaningful that players would speak up so dramatically in support of Mangini. It's meaningful because the reason Mangini's tenure in New York ended so quickly is that the feeling about Mangini inside the Jets locker room was nearly unanimous—they couldn't stand him. The inmates should never run the asylum but it's antiquated thinking that if the players hate the coach then the coach must be doing something right. In truth, he was doing something wrong and Jets ownership and management was convinced that it wasn't going to change.

It took Mangini an additional year to learn what Jets management understood. Mangini changed little in his first year with the Browns from his days with the Jets and it was nearly the reason he was fired before that season ended.

But Mangini seems to have learned and the fact that players like Sheldon Brown, Lawrence Vickers and Alex Mack, a pretty good cross section really of aging veterans from other teams, veterans on this team who have seen it all, and emerging younger players, are willing to come to their coach's defense speaks volumes, or at least it should.

It may all be for naught of course because if Holmgren wants to return to coaching and do it here in Cleveland then Mangini's fate is sealed and none of the positives will have any impact. And if that turns out to be the case, at least now Mangini should know that the changes he made will get him another shot somewhere, which is something that seemed ludicrous just 12 months ago.

**

While Mangini's fate is the hot topic around town, the coach whose status isn't getting enough attention but should is Byron Scott's with the Cavaliers. After 30 games this team is 8-22 and seems as directionless and as poorly coached as any team in Cleveland history.

The argument of course is that Scott doesn't have much to work with but is it less than what Mangini has with the Browns? That is a stretch. In large measure the Cavs are nearly the same team as last season except without two key components, LeBron James and former head coach Mike Brown. The loss of James makes the team worse, of course, but would this same team under Brown but with James nursing an injury for the season's first 30 games really be 8-22?

It seems quaint now the thought that dumping Brown would be a major positive for this franchise, not enough to offset the loss of James but enough of a positive to keep the franchise going in the right direction. Instead the loss of Brown seems to be making every bit as much of a difference as the loss of James.

It's hard to quantify, of course, but the one thing that could be said about Brown that can't be said of Scott is that Brown hardly ever seemed in over his head. Ok, maybe Brown was in over his head when it came to the playoffs, particularly deep in the playoffs. But that's a high class problem. Right now this team would be better off with a coach who didn't seem, well, so clueless about what it takes to put a team together and play winning basketball.

When you listen to Scott in interviews, he sounds smart enough. He stands stoically and folds his arms a lot, too. And yet when you sift through it all you start to realize that he's mostly hot air and lost, irretrievably lost. He changes strategy and lineups so often that its understandable why the players look so confused out there.

Contrast that for a moment with Mangini. Whether or not you are a Mangini fan or detractor we can all agree that he has a way of going about his business and he doesn't waver from it. His process may not lead the Browns to the Super Bowl someday but he does have a system. Scott isn't even that fully realized.

When this historically bad Cavaliers season comes to a close, owner Dan Gilbert is going to find himself with an incredibly shrinking season ticket holder base. It would have shrunk anyway without James and the promise his game always brought but it will shrink even more because of Scott. Indeed, if Mangini survives with the Browns, then there's an even greater likelihood that he'll be around longer than Scott. Gilbert isn't the hair-trigger owner that he's often portrayed as being but he is decisive. As Bob Dylan once wrote, “when something's not right, it's wrong.” And once Gilbert lands on that fact with Scott, which will likely be sooner than later, Scott will be gone and the Cavs will reboot. It may be Gilbert's only chance to save the franchise from another two decades of futility.

**

I'm pretty sure this is how Larry Bird rolled.

There was an item in Business Insider this past week that really put into perspective why James was never going to re-sign with Cleveland. The item is a PowerPoint presentation by SA Global Plus, a fledgling (to be incredibly generous) media company based in Miami that is putting on James' birthday celebration on December 30th at Coco de Ville, a hotel in Miami.

The presentation is an example of the kind of celebrity excess that is the world that James and his ilk live in, the kind of excess that James could never get in Cleveland.

The presentation is really a pitch to line up corporate sponsors for James' birthday party. (Here's a link to the presentation) For $10,000 the sponsors will get appropriate signage at the party and a chance to stuff their goods in celebrity goody bags, because what adult birthday party doesn't have goody bags? On its web site SAGP, as they like to call themselves, promises an “A” list roster of musicians, athletes and models. The presentation, which SAGP has since removed from its web site, also promises its major sponsors (defined as someone willing to pay $500,000), additional involvement in what they call the “LeBron James Dinner Party Tour.” The Tour started in New York two weeks ago and continues through February in several major cities (Cleveland is not included) and coincides obviously with the Miami Heat's schedule.

If all this sounds ridiculous it's because it is. But let's be fair to James. This isn't the first celebrity birthday party to be sponsored and it won't be the last. This kind of thing is actually pretty common these days among the slightly accomplished types like James, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton, to name a few that have likewise gone down this path.

How any of this ties into winning a NBA championship isn't exactly clear but maybe winning a championship really was never James' point. The birthday party and dinner tour that he has aligned himself with for whatever chump change it puts in his pocket is the antithesis to the dedication and commitment it takes to actually accomplishing something meaningful with your life. James lives and moves now in a world that values the cult of celebrity above all else. It is the antithesis of a family dynamic where instead of surrounding yourself with the kind of support system necessary to achieve your goals you instead put yourself in the middle of a vacuous world where your support system consists of celebrity friends who aren't friends at all but paid party goers designed to make you look more important than you'll really ever be.

Maybe James can eventually win a ring but that is never going to happen until he understands that the only real way to get to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice, practice and not simply to buy your way in.

Ready to Move On?

Are you ready to move on yet? It doesn’t matter, because it’s apparently not a request.

After being publicly mugged in the worst piece of television since NBC greenlighted the Joey show a few years ago, Cleveland sports fans are being told, nee admonished, by national media types who don’t know any better that they need to move on from it all.

Easy for them to say. The problem for Cleveland sports fans is that nothing good ever comes from them moving on. When Cavaliers fans moved on from The Shot, what did they get other than years of mediocrity, fleeting superiority, and finally abject disappointment?

When Browns fans were told to move on from The Drive and The Fumble, what did they get other than the first crack at a churlish Bill Belichick and then a morally and financially bankrupt owner revealed his true self and moved the franchise to Baltimore?

And let’s not get started with Indians fans. When the 1954 series blew up in their faces, they were told to move on only to enter their celebrated blue period in which their team usually couldn’t even spell win when spotted the “w” and the “n.” Then when the team blew the 1997 World Series, they were told to move on only to find, once again, that except for fleeting moments, anomalies in retrospect, the celebrated blue period was beginning anew.

When it comes to Cleveland sports there really is no place to move on to, unless you’re an ill-mannered free agent with a leadership problem. Then of course you can pack up your talents and move them to South Beach or whatever better venue awaits.

Nonetheless expect the fans to take this latest slight in due course, mainly because it’s such a learned skill by this point that it almost seems rote. In fact, you can almost feel as if this town has moved well beyond this latest kick in the groin and it’s barely been a week.

Ok, so you've moved on. Here's where that gets you:

As an organization, the Cavs are officially in the rebuild mode. They'll have good company with the Indians and the Browns, both of whom are charter members of that club.

It will be awhile before the Cavs direction is truly revealed. The hiring of Byron Scott hints at the future but there's the hard work of finding the players to adapt to his system. At least there's a decent organization in place.

The Indians meanwhile are entrenched if not completely encased in last place. The Browns, on the other hand, are still a few weeks out from training camp, which tends to make things look more hopeful.

But that's just the overview. Here's the details:

The one thing you could say, though, about the Indians at the moment is that most fans are actually getting their wish. The Indians for once have listened and are letting the kids play. Of course they're charging major league prices, but that's a different debate.

If not getting what you want is the worst thing in the world, then a close second is getting what you want, especially with this version of the Indians. Watching minor leaguers play against major leaguers on a nightly basis is a rather painful experience. You tend to see them make the kind of errors they probably haven’t made since American Legion ball. They often looked overmatched at the plate, mostly because they are.

It’s a sloppy mess of a team, a puppy actually, trying it’s best to keep up with far better, stronger dogs. Sure every once in awhile, 38.6% of the time to be precise, the little dog wins a game. But if you’re heading to Progressive Field anytime soon then you better be a baseball purist. Otherwise the entertainment value vacillates somewhere between a re-run of the 1998 World Series of Poker and a re-run of the 2003 Greater Milwaukee Open.

If you're watching on SportsTime Ohio, don't adjust your set. Management there is not running the same tape every night, the numbing sameness of each game only makes it feel that way.

But at least Russell Branyan is no longer on the team. That development means more than just the fact that he’s practicing his own special brand of bad baseball somewhere else. It also means that general manager Mark Shapiro is taking most of the blockers out of the current system, the players seemingly added to the team specifically to block the development of the next generation.

It’s also worth pointing out that while the team that starts the second half of the season is not the same as the team that started the first half of the season, the team starting the second half of the season isn’t the one that will finish it, either and, for good measure, the team that finishes it won’t resemble the team that starts the next season.

Where the Indians are concerned, it’s what is called the Circle of Life. Nothing breeds fan indifference and confusion more than a revolving door on the clubhouse. Quick, you non-purists out there, name the Indians’ starting lineup? Now be truthful, how many did you get right? But don't worry. You'll have another chance in a few weeks when the lineup turns over again.

Jake Westbrook and Kerry Wood are the two likeliest candidates to be moved by Shapiro, though Jhonny Peralta is a strong candidate as well. Westbrook’s probably leaving because he said he’d like to stay and in this town teams pretty much do the opposite of what’s expected. Wood will move on because some contending team will need another guy out of the bullpen. Peralta, meanwhile, will probably just fade into the scenery somewhere else.

All this means that the shuttle bus between Cleveland and Columbus will get a few more clicks on the ol’ odometer, as Jerry Fleck might say. That’s not a complaint. It’s what fans in fact demanded.

As whatever remaining interest in the Indians wanes over the next few weeks, it will be just in time for the latest reinvention of the Cleveland Browns.

The team had a reinvention last season when head coach Eric Mangini was hired by owner Randy Lerner in the kind of rush that suggested Lerner had a soccer game to get to. Mangini in turn hired his own boss, which worked out about as well as that kind of thing tends to work out. When it all fell apart, Lerner, back from the pitch, reinvented the team again and this time may have hit on something.

With Mike Holmgren and Tom Heckert in charge of the team, it finally has the professional management it’s so sorely lacked in the last decade. Someone who’s 150 pounds overweight isn’t going to get skinny in a week and a team in this bad of shape isn’t going to get good overnight. But you do sense an actual direction, which is as much hope as Cleveland fans are allowed to have anyway.

But even if the Browns season turns out better than imagined, fans know what happens next. There is a pending labor dispute and it would be a minor miracle if there isn't a lockout/strike that will halt the next season. Which means, of course, that whatever progress is made now is likely to be fleeting.

And that's the point, isn't it. Every time Cleveland sports fans head down a tunnel and find see some light, it turns out to be an oncoming train. But past being prologue here, they'll just move on once again.

Getting It Done

The Cleveland Cavaliers hired a new head coach Thursday and it’s only the second biggest story in Cleveland sports. The first, of course, is the simple fact that LeBron James, for the first time in his professional career, is officially no longer a member of the Cavaliers.

It may be that James re-signs with the Cavs but for now he’s not on the team’s roster. It seems strange to actually write that statement because while July 1st has been a day circled on the calendar of Cavs fans for years now it’s hard to believe the day actually arrived.

Yet it has and on that very same day the Cavs found themselves with a new coach, someone well respected around the league and, for the most part, a marquee name. For those who think that the Cavs future is only about James, this runs counter to that narrative. That means that soon we’ll see a whole bunch of analysis by those thrown for this loop and as with almost everything else you’ve heard or read for the last several weeks, it will probably be wrong.

Here’s the most salient points to know at the moment about Byron Scott, the new head coach. He is highly coveted and the best coach available at the moment. He’s got credibility with players borne of experience and a resume, including twice coaching the New Jersey Nets to the NBA Finals and winning a title three times as a player with the Los Angeles Lakers. He also wasn’t exactly begging for the Cavs job. He had other options, including remaining a highly paid NBA analyst.

It was widely reported by supposed league insiders that Scott would not commit to any job until he knew Phil Jackson’s status in Los Angeles. Jackson has hinted at retirement and these league insiders said that Scott not only wanted that job but would be the frontrunner if Jackson indeed did retire. We all know James’ uncertain status at the moment.

To all the ESPN and Sports Illustrated know-it-alls, not to mention anyone with ready access to the internet, this of course meant that the Cavs would find themselves without a head coach during the James sweepstakes, severely handicapping their chances of re-signing him. It also meant to them that should James not re-sign, the Cavs were a dead franchise walking and would have to settle for, at best, another Mike Brown as its head coach.

And yet Scott is signed, sealed and delivered. Hmmm, I wonder what went wrong?

It’s simple, really. These so-called analysts and insiders are mostly navel gazers with no greater insight than Russ who works in the mailroom. As simple as adding 1 + 1 would appear to be, they keep coming up with “3” as the answer mainly because they mostly rely on each other as their sources for the next great rumor.

What they lack in insight and factual information they make up for it with an abundance of confidence. And yet as they now try to explain exactly went wrong in their math this time, they’re not likely to land on the one thing they overlooked, Dan Gilbert.

And if they ever bothered to really think about that for a moment, they’d begin to realize that Gilbert has a way of actually getting things done. Casino gambling in Ohio was turned down by the voters repeatedly. Gilbert entered the fray when everyone else said it couldn’t get done, assembled the right team, played the appropriate amount of hardball and in the end got what he wanted, a casino that he’ll own that will be within spitting distance of his arena.

Now all Gilbert’s done is again get the best coach available. Gilbert landed early on Tom Izzo and he would have been an interesting choice. But he was always a reach anyway, given his current situation at Michigan State. When that didn’t work out, Gilbert didn’t pout. Instead he went about getting Scott and with that settled a front office that some said was a mess. It never was.

The signing of Scott is an object lesson in how the Cavs operate and provides a key lesson for those trying to forecast what James will do.

Scott is extremely familiar with the league. He knows the personalities and the players, on the court, in the front office and in the owner’s suite. The fact that Scott could be convinced to take the Cleveland job without any guarantees about James or Jackson speaks volumes about what he thinks of Gilbert.

Scott is convinced that whatever plays out with any particular player, including James, Gilbert is prepared to spend as necessary to keep this team in contention.

It’s a much different promise than the kind Larry Dolan made when he bought the Indians. In the first place, Gilbert never made any such public proclamation. Instead all he’s done is actually gone about doing it, time and time again. He’s spent huge sums on a state-of-the-art practice facility and in upgrading the Quicken Loans Arena. He’s shown no fear of paying basketball’s luxury tax, which is hefty, in order to maintain a high quality roster.

In short, he’s done everything Dolan has not. Consider, for example, this past season. Sure it had the overarching dynamic of being perhaps James’ last season and thus potentially the last best chance for the Cavs to really compete for the NBA title, but all Gilbert did was empower former general manager to spend and trade and do whatever Ferry felt necessary to get this team over the hump.

The fact that Ferry wasn’t successful doesn’t mean that the effort was lacking. Putting together a team is far more art than science anyway. But if you’re Scott and doing your due diligence, what this tells you is that Gilbert is willing to provide the necessary resources.

It’s really much the same analysis James will use as well and, what’s more, every team that covets James seems to understand that point, despite how many time the writers supposedly covering this story miss it. It may sound impressive, for example, that the Nets’ new owner is flying in from Russia to be part of the meeting with James, but the simple truth is that he had no other choice.

This aspect of James’ career is all about business and that means dealing with and understanding ownership. If James’ were buying a team, it wouldn’t much matter who owned it previously. But the fact that he’ll essentially be in partnership with this owner, it behooves James (or anyone, for that matter) to get to know your potential partner well.

It’s obvious that Scott learned enough about Gilbert during the interview process to become convinced that he wanted to partner with him and vice versa. James is going through much the same process now, trying to learn what he can about the prospective business he’ll be a part of for a long time before making a decision.

And yet all we’ve been fed by too many experts with too much time on their hands is dribble and drabble about World Wide Wes and Chris Bosh and billboards and rallies and real estate agents and the like, none of which alone or in combination much matters when real people come together to make real live decisions.

When all this is over in the next few weeks, go back and read some of the stories that have consumed your recent days to laugh at how foolish it all ended up being. Gilbert has always been the key to the Cavs future, with or without James and that hasn’t changed since the day Gilbert arrived.

And if someone wants to bet you against Gilbert getting James, take that bet. Gilbert just has a knack for making those who bet against him look foolish