Home Is Where The Heart Is

This one feels different, much different.

When Lebron James first joined the Cleveland Cavaliers, he effectively had no choice. The worst team with the number one pick in the NBA draft gets who it wants and James was the biggest no-brainier pick in the history of the league.

When he left it was a crotch kick, a punch to an unexpected gut of a city that always seems to get an unexpected punch. That same desperate, lost, hurt that was felt when Art Modell pulled the Browns out of Cleveland was its logical antecedent. To literally lose your sporting blood put the city in a football wilderness that took, you guessed it, nearly four years to remedy.

When James bolted the first chance he had he left the team in ruins. That may have been exactly why he left. But he took Cleveland’s heart with him and it spent, yep, four years figuring how it could all begin again.

The reason this feels so different is that this times James had a choice. He could go anywhere he wanted and he decided to come back here. You'd have to go back to Bernie Kosar’s manipulation of the NFL’s supplemental draft in order to land in Cleveland to recall an even remotely similar sense of not just pride but of affirmation for the reason that most of us with a choice nonetheless remain.

No longer is there any concern about his basketball future. He’ll finish his career, hopefully another 10 years from now, as a Cav. All the cringing fans used to do when James would wear a Yankees hat is gone forever.  He can follow any baseball or football team he wants. There will be no need to read anything into those kinds of gestures. James chose here not there and it has the absolute feeling of finality, both a prodigal son and favorite son returning, satisfied with his time away and relishing his future on his home turf.

I read James’ decision letter, twice.   It was a master stroke, the likes of which are rare in professional sports. Sure it went through the editing process and sure some of it, maybe most of it, was calculated to put a different spin on what James is really about. Yet it felt genuine. It was fully realized and actualized. It contained no false promises. It just laid it out in rather simple terms and in the process seemingly made fools of all of those who, from a very great distance, thought they understood what he really was all about.

Without saying it directly, James nonetheless laid out the case for why he's not the mercenary many of us, me included, thought he was. It certainly helps that the Cavs have some excellent assets to work with, certainly more than the Heat at the moment. But the pull to come home, to raise his sons in a place with less glitz and more sensibilities, seems to have predominated.

His letter in many ways read like the words of Bruce Springsteen in “Long Walk Home” and it's easy think about what James is telling his own kids at the moment and what other dads in Akron and Cleveland are telling theirs:

My father said, “Son, we’re luck in in this town. It's a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps itself around you, no one crowds you no one goes it alone.”

That is exactly the way this town has always treated James. He lives just a few minutes from me and he's easy to spot when he's in town. Sometimes alone at the movie theater. Sometimes riding his bike on the local streets. Sometimes playing softball at the local high school. No one crowds him but he knows the people around here have his back.

The other striking aspect of this almost surreal moment in Cleveland sports history is how much James has grown as a person in the last four years. He wrote that his four years in Miami felt like college. He went in a know-it-all and came out a humbler man comfortable with not having all the answers. It's exactly the point of going off to college, or the army, or wherever it is that one goes when they have to leave home in order to grow up.

James is absolutely correct when he wrote that there was nothing to be gained in holding a grudge against Dan Gilbert or the fans who cursed his very existence. Indeed he offered up exactly the right perspective without specifically giving Gilbert a pass for the screed Gilbert wrote when James left. James saw himself in the shoes of those he spurned and understood both their anger and their angst.

I also get though why Gilbert didn't publicly renounce his screed in the last several days. It would have looked shallow and opportunistic. Better to have handled it as he did, per James, face to face and man to man.

For all the criticism leveled at Gilbert, and I've leveled plenty at him myself, you have to give him his due. He overcame his own impetuousness and sprinkled with a little luck when it comes to the ping pong balls has put together enough of a franchise now to at least give fans hope that the team isn't just James and 11 other guys. More importantly though he gained his own perspective about the NBA that was learned the hard way, a perspective that when coupled with James’ maturity, will really serve this franchise well as it pursues it's stated goal of bringing  this town a championship.

There is enough cynicism in sports and life that it's virtually certain that some, maybe many, will try to find the holes in James’ story, the real motives behind the move. But not on this day. There is no way to spoil a win, nor should there be, for fans who haven't seen enough of it.

I suspect many feel like Gus Sinski at the mound talking to Billy Chapel as he was throwing a perfect game in “For Love of the Game.” Collectively we would be saying “we don't stink right now because of you. We’re the best team in [basketball] because of you, right now, right this minute because of you. We’re not gonna screw it up, we’re gonna be awesome for you. “

Let's hope he remains awesome for us. He’s off to a perfect start.

Decision II, The Sequel

If LeBron James is close to making a decision about his basketball future you wouldn’t know it, at least from him.  The speculation and scenarios being drawn are all on the if/come and mostly exist in that odd space where wishful thinking repeated often enough magically turns into fact.

James will make whatever decision he needs to make soon enough.  The basis on which that decision will get made has not changed.  He will play basketball for the team that gives him the absolute best path to continue to win championships.  It really is as simple as that and as complicated, for the team that gives him that mythical best chance is a matter of opinion, not fact.

If there is anything amusing at the moment or perhaps delicious is watching/listening/reading the angst of the Miami Heat fan as they ponder life without James, first, then Dwyane Wade, second, then Chris Bosh a distant third.  It’s as if Heat fan continues to harbor the belief that this so called Big 3, in and of itself, presents the best opportunity for more NBA rings.  That belief was delivered a hard blow of reality in this year’s NBA Finals, but why let the facts get in the way.

Dan Le Betard, writing in Monday’s Miami Herald, had a column that mostly rings true until it doesn’t.  His overarching message is that Heat fans need to relax because rumor isn’t fact and unless and until James speaks, there is nothing to see.  That’s fine as far as it goes.  Unfortunately it goes further as Le Betard then essentially runs down the same rat holes to offer the counter theory that James isn’t going anywhere because, I guess, wishful thinking. 

He says James likes Miami, is a team player, yadda yadda yadda.   This is supposed to give a suddenly anxious Miami fan looking for any good news comfort?  Maybe.  But offering it up is to simply provide counterpoint to the other theories out there and why, for example, James will end up back in Cleveland, nothing more.

Nature abhors a vacuum and so do sports fan.  In the absence of real news, they’ll make it up.  The whole Twitter explosion on Sunday about Dan Gilbert’s plane is just another version of “so and so has his house on the market” or “so and so was in town looking for houses.”

So let’s return to, as that great American statesman and linguist Don Rumsfeld would say, to the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.

James is a mercenary, plain and simple.  He may love Miami.  He may love Akron.  But in truth if this were the mid 1930s and Munich, Germany had a team in the NBA owned by a guy with a funny moustache, James would sign with Mr. Hitler’s group if it presented him with the absolute best path to championships.  Plenty of NBA players took the blood money from serial racist Donald Sterling for years.  James isn’t motivated as much by money because he earns so much off the court.  He’s motivated solely by winning and if that’s with the Munich Stormtroopers James would be the last person to express regret.

James is loyal to this friends and teammates.   That was true in Cleveland and is true in Miami.  It was also be true should he land in still another city.  Remember, kids change schools all the time.  New friends get made.  When you have f-you money, your friends tend to find you anyway.  James didn’t stay in Cleveland out of loyalty to friends and he won’t do it in Miami either unless that loyalty presents him with the absolute best path to championships.

Those are the known knowns.  The known unknowns consist mostly of what James believes provides him the best path to championships.  This will remain unknown until, again to channel Rummy, it’s known and not before.  All of the great and not so great NBA writers with well-placed sources and high minded opinions can speculate all they want about Cleveland’s core of young players and their view of where that puts the team in the league pecking order.  The only analysis that means anything is the one James is currently pondering as he vacations while others simultaneously start and extinguish fires.

The unknown unknowns are the trickiest for it’s theoretically possible that James will alter his thinking and leave his talents in Miami or take them elsewhere based on something other than the absolute best path to championships.  And this is where these kinds of columns tend to fall apart. 

As writers, as speculators, as fans, we crave information.   The less available it is the more we crave it.  In the absence of information we’ll just fill in the blanks ourselves based on nothing more than wishful thinking as to how we want it to turn out or think it ought to turn out.

Truthfully, here anyway, there are no unknown unknowns.  When all is said and done and James has made his decision he’ll say what he’s always said: “I want to win championships and this is the place that gives me the best chance for that.”  If that exact quote or something close enough for government work isn’t said at the time of Decision II, The Sequel, I’ll eat my hat.

There isn’t any real romance to sports.  Things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to.  The only thing you get is what you actually deserve and even then that’s up for grabs.  You don’t get a hole in one on the golf course just because it’s your birthday and you don’t land the best basketball player on the planet just because you think you got screwed by him 4 years ago.

It would mean a great deal to this town to once again have a viable winter diversion.  When James left he took a piece of everyone with him.  He may have matured in these last 4 years but never confuse maturity with sentimentality.  He won’t come to Cleveland just because he thinks he owes it to this town.  He’ll come if at all because, let’s say it together, it gives him the absolute best path to championships.  We can talk about the potential of Kyrie Irving, Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and whoever else is on the roster when the dust clears. 

The only opinion that has ever mattered in this equation is James’ and if the roster falls short relative to what he sees elsewhere then Cavs fans can again lament their misfortune.  And so that we don’t confuse the issue, the misfortune is not that James didn’t choose Cleveland.  It’s that the Cavs and all their front office changes over the last four years didn’t accomplish nearly enough to make his decision easy for him.

The Numbing Sameness of it All, Again--Dan Gilbert Edition

Dan Gilbert is clever, you have to give him that.  Early in his career as the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers he came across as the prototypical meddling owner who had made money in one line of business and figured that genius translated into the world of sports.  To fans, Gilbert was a huge red flag, a combination of Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones. 

At some point Gilbert became sensitive or at least aware of the impression that was developing. He toned down the act, seemingly turning his attention away from the Cavs and more toward becoming the Moe Green of the Midwest.  Turns out, that perception was the deceiving one. 

Behind the more stealth look that Gilbert crafted beats the heart of an owner whose goals are simply amorphous platitudes about winning and excellence that cannot be achieved because he lacks the temperament to reach them. 

In his 9 years as owner of the Cavs, Gilbert has had 3 general managers and four head coaches.  Let that roll around the inside of your head for a moment.  Three general managers and four head coaches in 9 years. 

That’s almost the exact trajectory of the Cleveland Browns, easily the worst run sports franchise in the last 20 years.  Gilbert’s lay low approach of the last few years belies an impetuousness and an incompetency that rivals that of Randy Lerner.  The reason it gets less attention is that the Cavs are and always will be third in the hearts and minds of Cleveland sports fans.  Most simply don’t care. 

When you’re running a private business with no outside shareholders, the public results are harder to discern.  For all anyone knows or cares, Gilbert chews through vice presidents at Quicken Loans at the same rate he chews through executives and coaches at the Cavs.  That doesn’t matter.  What does is that the Cavs’ business is in the public eye and at the nearly 10-year mark of Gilbert’s ownership, the picture isn’t pretty.   

Gilbert has shown no greater competence than the Gund brothers before him. The Cavs under Gilbert have been transcendent only when they had a transcendent player that fell into his lap.  When the planets realigned, the franchise became decidedly non-transcendent, again.  Gilbert isn’t just the figurehead on which to level the blame.  He’s the perpetrator and instigator of a highly dysfunctional and withering franchise that is still years away, at best, from being any sort of contender and then only if something dramatic happens at the top. 

Undoubtedly Gilbert would like the team to be a success.  It would certainly help bring in more people to his downtown casino during the winter months if the Cavs were contenders and Quicken Loans arena was sold out 41 times during the cold Cleveland winter.  But the Cavs aren’t successful under Gilbert, except around the fringes.  Gilbert, the only one in the franchise with actual power to wield, is the only consistent piece remaining in place these last nearly 10 years.  It’s easy to see where the buck stops and the blame lies.   

The NBA is, without question, the hardest league in which to construct a champion.  That may seem counterintuitive given the relatively small rosters when compared to baseball and football, but the numbers don’t lie.  When a team is down it stays down for years.  A shallow pool of new, NBA-ready talent each year and a salary cap riddled with exceptions are the primary reasons. 

As a result, the league at any given time has essentially 3 groups of teams.  The top group is the very small handful of teams with enough talent to actually threaten for a championship.  Teams in this group feature at least one super duper star and enough almost super duper stars to give them the depth to survive the grind that is the NBA playoffs.  The Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs are two obvious examples.

The middle group is the larger group of playoff teams looking to get into the top group.  The group has its own hierarchy.  There are the teams that just squeak into the playoffs, usually with losing records, which is the equivalent of NBA purgatory because it’s very difficult for those teams to improve without outside help.  The draft is a non-event for them so they improve, if at all, somewhat organically but mostly by prying free agents away from other teams. Then there are the teams on the higher end of this group that seem on the precipice of getting into the top group.  Think Oklahoma City, maybe Indiana.  Some make it, some regress.  Much depends on organic growth or the pick up of a missing piece here or there.   Either way it’s still a slog. 

The bottom group are, naturally, the bottom feeders.  When a team enters this group it is a minimum of 10 years before it can even get to the upper level of the middle group, let alone membership in the top group.  You can look at virtually every former playoff team in recent history that thereafter entered this group.  It is 10 years before they get back into the playoffs. 

The Cavs, for a brief period, were a top group team because they had the league’s best player.  But for a variety of reasons, some having to do with LeBron James’ psychological profile and some having to do with Gilbert’s, the Cavs couldn’t hold on to James.  In retrospect, they weren’t really even in the conversation.  Once James left the Cavs dropped to a bottom feeding team and there they remain.  While James is pushing the Heat to a third straight NBA title, the Cavs can’t even seem to work their way up to membership in the middle group.  Gilbert’s meddling is the primary reason. 

It’s actually quite fascinating that Gilbert can’t seem to learn from the bad examples in front of him all the evils that visit a franchise when it constantly reboots.  The Browns’ are a mere few miles away and dominate the local papers and talk radio stations.  Gilbert must be in some serious denial about his own track record to think he’s not that kind of owner even as he goes about his business every day proving that he is. 

Here’s the dangerous game in all of this.  You can make a case, perhaps even a compelling case, for each of the moves that Gilbert has made in his 9 years.  It might have been a mistake, as Gilbert said last year, to fire Mike Brown the first time, but it also was an obvious mistake to hire him the second time.  The two concepts can coexist.  But that is seeing the trees and ignoring the forest.  Gilbert’s track record, irrespective of how compiled, is that of a meddling owner who can’t be satisfied. Why would a gifted free agent, let alone James, ever want to get involved in this mess?  The same goes for a gifted coach. 

So much of what’s been happening is that Gilbert can’t land on a general manager he trusts long enough to let a direction, any direction, of the club take hold.  It is exactly why the Browns are the mess they are.  Gilbert, like Jimmy Haslam now and Lerner before that, falls in and out of love quickly with his management hires, but not quickly enough to avoid the damage done.  Gilbert wants to win but deep pockets and force of will aren’t enough.  It takes temperament and discipline and at least in this business venture Gilbert falls short. 

Anyone who watched the jumble that was the Cavs last season completely understands why the season ended as it did.  That jumble was the most visible manifestation of all the dysfunction, impatience and impetuousness of the ownership and management team.  A new, permanent general manager and a coach of his own choosing could help on the margins.  But real, permanent change for the better isn’t going to be achieved until everyone in this franchise can stop looking over their shoulders in fear at what Gilbert might do next.

The Numbing Sameness of it All, Again--Another Day, Another Firing Edition

Another month, another firing in Cleveland professional sports.  Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert today fired general manager Chris Grant amidst one of the most dismal seasons by a team not named “the Browns.”  Unlike his counterpart with the Browns, no one is much questioning Gilbert’s sanity.  If anything fans are wondering what took Gilbert so long to figure out that Grant was Isiah Thomas without the name recognition.

A firing like Grant’s is littered with mistakes large and small.  But the two that bubble to the top first in this cesspool of despair are the drafting of Anthony Bennett and the re-hiring of Mike Brown.  There’s still time for Bennett to develop into, perhaps, a serviceable piece or part.  It’s hard to imagine though that he’ll ever be seen as anything less than one of the biggest draft busts in recent history.

As for Brown, his act is far more developed.  It’s hard to imagine how he survives losing the guy that stuck his neck out to rehire him.  Brown may survive the season, he may not.  Either way Gilbert has to be near suicidal for having been talked into giving Brown a 5-year contract.

Brown was hired because the Cavs had no interest in playing defense last season.  It’s Brown’s calling card. What’s been lost in translation though is that the team assembled by Grant still has no interest in playing defense and seem to be rebelling against Brown as if to emphasize the point.  It’s as if the players deliberately used Grant’s goofy press conference criticizing the players’ effort as a stepping off point.
The season is near half over and the transition to Brown’s approach seems to be getting worse not better.  It’s a hard sell and Gilbert knows it will be hard to convince fans that it’s always darkest before dawn.  No one will ever buy that the Cavs are near the dawn of their existence.  They are on permanent midnight at the moment.

Here’s what happens in any organization when there is a major change: players/employees inevitably fall into one of three buckets.  At one end of the spectrum are those that immediately get on board with the change and are anxious to follow the new lead.  Those are your keepers.  At the other end are those that won’t get on board ever.  They hate change and can’t fathom on any level that they’re wrong about anything.  They should be dumped immediately.  In the middle are those who can understand why the change was made and understand the need to change themselves.  Nonetheless they struggle with change.  Their efforts are earnest but uneven.  Eventually that group will trend to one of the other two buckets over the weeks and months following the change.

Life being the bell curve that it is, the first and second buckets are small at the outset.  The larger bucket is the third, those that understand but earnestly struggle with the change.

You can do your own math but at best there are maybe two players on the current team that got on board immediately with the Brown hiring.  Similarly there are maybe two at the other end of the spectrum.  That would put about 8 players in the middle.  Given the nature of this team it really doesn’t matter which bucket any player but Kyrie Irving occupies.  Based on recent results, even if Irving was in the struggling middle at one time he clearly was trending in the wrong direction.  His almost complete lack of effort against the Lakers on Wednesday evening was the most telling sign, even to Brown who sat him the entire fourth quarter.

The reason Irving matters most is that he’s the putative leader, the most recognizable face of the franchise.  His reputation league wide has always exceeded his actual accomplishments but he’s been given a large benefit of the doubt due to the state of the Cavs organization.  His fellow players see it much the same way and so if they see him bucking the system they’ll follow suit because they’ll think he’s right.

If Brown has any hope of surviving it will hinge almost entirely on his ability to turn Irving around and get him to buy into what he’s selling.  It may be an impossible task.   Irving already is making Gilbert nervous by whispering strategically about a future that doesn’t include the Cavs.  Grant leaving but Brown staying doesn’t much change that.  Alienating him further with a coach he doesn’t like won’t help the situation. Besides, Gilbert has a track record when it comes to placating stars at the expense of coaches.

Had Gilbert simply retained Brown in the first place once LeBron James left it’s far more likely that the Cavs would be closer to his dream of making the playoffs this season.  But he didn’t do that and is now paying dearly by fielding a collection of players at the expense of a team.  His team is as far from the playoffs as it ever was.

Gilbert has always had a mixed reputation among the fans and the mess that his franchise is in at the moment isn’t going to help it much.  Gilbert has never been the fussy tinkering owner in the model of the Washington Redskins’ Dan Snyder, but he is neither a particularly patient one either.  So it doesn’t surprise that on a seemingly random day he dumped Grant without a specific replacement in mind.  He knew at the very least that something, anything had to be done.

I suppose some credit should be given to Gilbert for trying to right the ship by attacking first the failings of the front office before taking on the coach whose hiring he just approved.  Players matter more than anything else and Grant simply was awful at assembling players.

But it’s more than fair to note that Gilbert probably waited too long to make the move.  That’s what comes when one is distracted.  In that Gilbert is not unlike Browns owner Jimmy Haslam whose distractions have literally thrown the entire franchise off kilter.  Only Gilbert really knows how much time he’s been spending on his burgeoning gambling empire at the expense of the Cavs but put it this way, it’s far more than before he started his quixotic quest to become a gambling mogul.

What the Grant firing really suggests more than anything is that Gilbert finally woke up to the disaster his Cavs asset had become.  It also suggests that sadly Gilbert hadn’t been paying close enough attention for too long.  There are other moves to make and other moves that will get made.  Gilbert might think that his first task is to find a general manager but it’s not.  His first task is to take a long look in the mirror and re-assess his own commitment to this team.    Like Haslam is finding out the hard way and now too is Gilbert, it really does start at the top.

Lingering Items--Bigger Truths Edition

If I had just one wish as a sports columnist, it would be to write with the absolute clarity and sense of purpose of Jason Whitlock.  He doesn’t duck important issues, particularly when race is involved.  He doesn’t adhere to conventional wisdom or anyone’s party line and doesn’t write to meet anyone’s expectations but his own.  Time and again he’ll be on the opposite side of where you’d thought he’d be on a particular issue and where you might be.  When you're finished, he'll change your mind.

His recent column on Jay-Z’s entrée into the world of sports as an agent is brilliant in both its simplicity and logic.  Jay-Z may be a cultural phenomena, Whitlock argues, but that doesn’t qualify him to represent athletes.  More to the point, Jay-Z only trusts his musical career to the best in the music business. Athletes like Kevin Durant and Robinson Cano should do likewise, meaning trust their athletic careers to the best in that business instead of a wanna be athlete living vicariously.  It’s such a solid, simple view that it reveals, in clear sentences contained in short paragraphs, the illogic of Durant firing his current agents only to be represented by Jay-Z.  It can't and won't end well.

But this isn’t a fan letter about or to Whitlock.  It’s more to emphasize that issues of race and politics and business and sports occasionally intersect and when they do sorting through them is tricky business.  The issues reveal themselves often enough that there's no need to contrive them, except if your the Plain Dealer's Bill Livingston.

Livingston never met a sentence he couldn’t torture or a thought he couldn’t mangle.  It’s usually best to ignore him, like his bosses do by relegating him to the back pages of the sports section waiting out his retirement.  Occasionally Livingston gets lucky, the Indians are off, the Browns and Cavs aren’t doing something stupid, and there’s a big hole to fill on the front page.  When that harmonic convergence occurs, we’re left with a column from Livingston like last week when he kind of sort of defended celebrity chef Paula Deen’s blatant racism by ham handedly using the Gordon Gee situation as a counterpoint, as if the situations are at all similar.

To put Deen and Gee in the same column is idiotic.  One is a racist and a hypocrite.  The other wears a bow tie.

Deen’s in trouble because she couldn't bring herself to settle a lawsuit/shakedown brought by someone who had the goods on her.  Now she's really paying because, well, she said what she said.  Yea, the legal system sucks sometimes.  Yea, the woman and her attorney were engaged in a legal form of extortion.  But ultimately Deen brought on her own demise because she hasn’t the good sense to understand that by not purposely escaping the vestiges of a racist upbringing you're damned to repeat them.

When it comes to Gee, what he said and did can’t credibly be argued as even remotely similar.  Making jokes at the expense of the boobs that run Notre Dame or mocking the modest academic achievements of certain SEC schools is a weird thing for a college president to do in any context but it isn’t racism or hypocrisy.  It’s just an uber geek unable to read the room.

The implication that Gee escaped his foibles as Deen is being unfairly punished given her recent change of heart is so off the mark that it makes you wonder if anyone at the PD bothered to even try to edit the column.    Gee was forced to retire.  His income, always less than Deen’s, was impacted.  Deen fell further because she had much further to fall.  Ohio State is as big of academic platform as anyone could want but it pales in comparison to the platform that Deen used very profitably to push her lard-based recipes on the public while hiding both the diabetes that her cooking style induced and the fact that once diagnosed she became a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical industry while still pushing the country toward obesity.

A sports columnist works best when he or she can take sports related events and find their inner truths in the context of a larger world.  That’s Whitlock’s unique talent and Livingston’s biggest problem.  With the Plain Dealer going to a mostly internet based platform, Livingston will now be forced to compete almost directly with Whitlock.  I suspect his retirement, like Gee’s, will be forced and will be soon as well. Good riddance.

**

The Indians have been one of the consistently worst teams in major league baseball the last 10 years.  Their attendance has been at or near the bottom in each of those years.  Some may see cause and effect but not club president Mark Shapiro.  He sees a different truth, one that requires no introspection on the failures of his front office reign.

Whether you view Shapiro has incompetent or unfairly hamstrung by cheap owners is probably missing the point.  Shapiro is a survivor of the first order because the chief skill he possesses is the ability to sell his genius to a gullible ownership that has bought everyone of his excuses without question or exception.

In a column in Crain’s Cleveland Business, Kevin Kelps unwittingly falls victim to Shapiro’s snake oil charm by advancing a Shapiro theory that the Indians’ attendance hasn’t really tanked, it’s been market corrected.  Under the Shapiro theory, per Kelps, the Indians’ sell out streak and attendance in the early 2000s was the result of a new stadium and a lack of competition from the Browns.  The loss of corporate backers that have moved out of town, increased competition from the Browns (as if) and a recession have all served to create a new normal where the Indians will be one of the worst draws in baseball because, well, they just will be because, I guess, we suck as fans.

Like most Shapiro theories, it has enough truthiness to pass muster among gullible owners and columnists.  But what’s far more fascinating is the utter lack of blame that Shapiro places on himself and his charges in building one of the worst teams in the league, year after year.  The underlying message from Shapiro is that wins and losses aren’t all that relevant to attendance.  Market size and competition within that market is what matters most.

What’s interesting about that theory is that it’s merely a rehash of what pre Jacobs field/Jacobs ownership tried to sell as well as if baseball games are to be enjoyed on their individual merits, like any other form of entertainment.  They, like Shapiro, sold that yarn because they couldn’t do what it really took to boost attendance: spend.  If fans are spending their discretionary cash on anything but the Indians, then that's the Indians' fault, not the fans.

There are true baseball fans among us but they are and always will be a minority here and elsewhere.  Baseball, like other major league sports, is not a collection of individual games but a pursuit with an overarching story, like a movie.  Brad Pitt can open a movie based on his name but he can’t make it profitable if the movie sucks.  Movie studio execs wouldn’t argue that the paying public should just be grateful to attend movies without regard to whether or not it’s entertaining so why should a baseball exec like Shapiro?

The Indians lousy attendance is directly and almost perfectly correlated to their performance.  It’s true that a particular game might be entertaining but most fans are tourists and not natives and so when they spend their money they want to maximize the chance that the product they’ll see will be entertaining.  A team that loses more than it wins doesn’t maximize the odds the average fan needs to make the investment and if there’s one thing we know about the Indians of the last decade it’s that they lose more than they win.

Shapiro has strangely held on to a job in which he’s been abjectly unsuccessful for most of it, assuming you judge success by wins and losses.  He’s not come close to building or sustaining a team that is more likely than not to win day in and day out.  He’s facilitated an ownership group that has repeatedly disappointed its fan base by refusing to make the needed investments despite promises to do so.

All I hear right now is that the Dolans did spend in the offseason.  They did.  But it doesn’t vitiate the previous decade when they didn’t. The indifference of fans now is that they already have the singe marks from the previous times they got too close to the flame.  You can't blame them for wanting to see more from a team and a franchise then a starting pitching staff that can't go 6 innings on a nightly basis.

Shapiro is smart enough to know that he’s selling a load of crap and smart enough, hopefully, to not actually believe that load of crap.  The truth is that the potential of this market is known and it’s much higher than what we’re seeing now because the team has been so bad.  Is it as high as it was in 2001?  Perhaps not.  But this town has more than demonstrated it will pay up and show up when given a consistent reason to do so.  Shapiro has more than proven an inability to give the fans their reason and the only ones who truly don’t get that simple point are the most important: the Dolans.

**

The Cavs' pursuit of rickety and underperforming free agent center Andrew Bynum is perhaps one of the most fascinating free agent pursuits in years.  By almost any measure, Bynum isn’t worth even half the money the Cavs have thrown at him.  He’s basically the basketball equivalent of Grady Sizemore, drawing interest based on his theoretical value unrelated to his actual production because all too often he's injured.

What makes it fascinating is that the Cavs offered to make him richer in one year than the average fan will see in a lifetime and yet they still couldn't keep him from pursuing a contract elsewhere.  Bynum and his agent felt obliged to test the greater fool theory to see if there’s anyone dumber or more desperate than the Cavs.  There could be.  Sports owners and executives are generally a nervous bunch. It didn't turn out to be the case.

The plight of the Cavs is such that they literally have to throw that kind of money around to even get in a conversation with a player of any credibility and it’s a stretch right now to even but Bynum in that category.  Cleveland is a miserable place to be in the winter and that’s the heart of the NBA season.  The Cavs have nice facilities but so does everyone else.  What they lack is something they can’t change: the weather.  They also don’t have enough horses to be considered an upper echelon team at the moment so whoever comes is coming into a rebuilding project that may or may not take.  It's not Shaquille O'Neal sidling up to LeBron James.

Twelve million a year is  certainly enough to get me to live even in Michigan during a football season but that doesn’t mean I’d like it and it may be enough to get Bynum to Cleveland even if he won’t like it.  But if either Atlanta or Dallas had gotten close to the Cavs offer, Bynum wasn't coming and the Cavs and they could have continued to stockpile cash and cap space in the misguided belief that LeBron James sees the errors of his way and returns to a city he didn’t much like in the first place.

The Cavs will be built, if at all, organically.  Free agents show up in basketball when they think they are the final piece and not the first.

**

There are plenty of sports questions to ponder, but the biggest question to ponder this week (and last): will it ever stop raining?

Lingering items--Collective Shrug Edition

On Tuesday night, the Cleveland Indians beat the Oakland A's 1-0.  It was the second straight win for the Tribe over the As. It also was the team’s  8th win in their last 9 games and pushed their season record to 16-14.  Overall, a decent start to the season, right?  The answer depends on what you’re measuring.

While the Indians were winning there were a total of 9,474 people in attendance at that game or about 40 less than the night before.  Those are the kind of pre-Jacobs Field numbers that ought to give fans the willies.  Apparently it’s just giving them shrugs.

The Indians have the worst attendance in the major leagues and they aren’t even sniffing the next worse team, the Kansas City Royals.  In fact, the Indians would have to increase their average per game attendance by a whopping 27%, or another 268,000 fans over the rest of the season, just to equal the Royals’ average.

Parsing further, if you eliminate opening day and the first game of the Yankees’ series, each of which drew over 40,000 fans, the Indians are averaging almost to the person the attendance at Tuesday night’s A's game.  That would mean they’d have to attract almost a half million more fans than the current pace just to stay with the Royals' current average.

Lest anyone think this suggests that the Indians’ attendance is in a free fall, that wouldn’t be quite accurate.  Year over year the Indians are averaging a mere 534 fans less per game than at the same point in 2012.  This year’s poor attendance isn’t news, it’s the norm.

When you think about all this in economic terms it’s pretty clear that the Indians’ are losing more and more ground against their competitors.  If you assume that the average fan spends a mere $20 at a game, including his ticket, the difference between the Indians’ and Royals’ attendance translates to more than $5.3 million less in revenue for the Indians and that’s being exceptionally conservative in estimates.  It’s probably far closer to $10 million and likely even more than that.

There are a multitude of reasons for the Indians’ poor attendance including the deadening approach that the owners, Larry and Paul Dolan, have taken over the years.  A seemingly never ending string of poor personnel decisions wrapped around an exceptionally tight budget have combined to make the Indians not just a perennially lousy team but a boring one as well.  The fans have been systemically conditioned to expect the worst.  This past off season the Dolans decided to switch the paradigm, at least for one season, by spending money in advance of the revenues.  It’s resulted in a marginally better team and a less boring one to boot.  They lead the league in home runs, for example. But the revenues at this point aren’t following.  Indeed they are still dropping.  If that trend continues, don’t look for deficit spending next off season and so the spiral will deepen.

The Dolans haven’t been the worst owners in team history or even the cheapest.  But they haven’t done much to infuse the franchise with much excitement either.  They've entrusted their  franchise to Mark Shapiro, first as general manager and now as team president, and the results, well, speak for themselves.  Chris Antonetti is relatively new to his job but he’s a Shapiro acolyte and subordinate so there’s no reason to expect a different approach or result.  The on field results this group has achieved are dubious.  But perhaps the broader indictment is that they’ve been part of a far larger problem.  Their indifferent ownership and poorly executed approach has helped foster a town of indifferent sports fans, people that at best casually care about what's happening but certainly not enough to invest.

The Indians mostly own the spring and summer and as they’ve wallowed in the muck and mire, people who were once fans have been infected not with disdain but indifference.  At least when fans show animosity toward you they’re feeling something.  They’re engaged still on an emotional level.  When they’re indifferent it simply means they just don’t care what happens.

But we can’t lay this all at the feet of the Indians though because they have the longest season they get a slightly larger share of the blame.  Cleveland is a Browns town and it hardly bears mentioning the soul-sucking siege that this team has inflicted on this area.  Randy Lerner was not just a reluctant owner he was an indifferent one as well and it showed in both his approach and in his results.

The sale to Jimmy Halsam was at least two years too late.  Yet even with all the issues Haslam is facing professionally, he still remains the best hope to re-energize the moribund franchise.  Unfortunately, those professional issues are a huge distraction to Haslam personally and will be for months, if not years, to come.  Meanwhile he’s entrusted the day to day operations to perhaps the most boring front office executive ever in Joe Banner.  Holmgren was a joke but his nonsensical outbursts at least added comic relief.  Banner just generally rests his head on his hands and sighs.  It’s the perfect meme not just for the completed draft but for the fans as well.

Then there’s the Cavs, bleeding fans at a faster clip than even the Indians.  The Cavs have been in a free fall for 3 years now coinciding with the loss of LeBron James.  During that time owner Dan Gilbert has been mostly distracted by an expanding empire of other businesses including his casinos.  Fans also know that the NBA is the toughest league in which to turn around a franchise so even a fully engaged Gilbert wouldn’t make much difference anyway.  Fans don’t just know the Cavs are awful right now they know they’ll be awful for years to come as well.  Put it this way, when the biggest selling point going into the next season is to tout the rehiring of a former coach who couldn’t win a championship with LeBron James, the franchise is in more trouble than it realizes.

When you look out toward the horizon on each franchise there’s nothing much to see and there hasn’t been for a long time, especially in the case of the Indians and the Browns.  It’s had an impact, a significant one, on the fans.  They’ve gone well beyond cynicism and are now simply indifferent and if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear from the Indians’ attendance results thus far, indifferent fans don’t throw good money after bad.

One of these years one of these teams will emerge to reinvigorate this town and give the fans a reason to believe again.  It's just that when you look out into the distance it doesn't look like a ship will be coming in any time soon.

**

One team that isn’t suffering from an indifferent fan base is the Ohio State Buckeyes.  According to a study done by USA Today in conjunction with the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center, the Buckeyes are one of but a handful of schools that have self-sustaining athletic departments, meaning that their revenues exceed their expenses without the need for subsidies either from local governments or student fees. Of the $49 million in ticket revenue generated by Ohio State fans, $41 million was from football.  I'd say that the Indians, Cavs and/or Browns owners would do anything to capture that kind of passion and coin but I know it isn't true.  They've had any number of opportunities and simply haven't done it.

The larger story on the Buckeyes front though is that they are mostly an anomaly in college sports.  They are one of only 23 Division I programs out of 228 that broke even or were in the black.  Within that group of 23 were just 7, including Ohio State, that didn’t receive any form of subsidy from either taxpayers or students in the form of fees.  And of that 7, Ohio State has the most intercollegiate teams to support: 36 overall.

Meanwhile, the NCAA as an entity has never enjoyed greater profits.  It had a whopping $71 million budget surplus in 2012, which, when coupled with the previous paragraph, tells an intriguing and disturbing story about the state of college athletics.

Perhaps the poster child for how wrongheaded things have gotten are our newest bestest buddies, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.  According to the USA Today study, Rutgers spent over $28 million more on athletics then it took in just last year.  To cover the short fall it had to take over $18 million from other areas of the college and the other nearly $10 million directly from the students in the form of additional fees.  I suspect the financial picture for Rutgers will get a bit better as members of the Big 10 but that alone won’t suffice.  Just over half, 7, of the Big 10 schools are running at a profit and only 5, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Indiana and Nebraska are doing that without any form of school or student subsidy.  Michigan needed over $250,000 in subsidies to make ends meet, which isn’t significant but it is informative.  If they can’t at least break even on their own accord with a facility like the Big House in Ann Arbor and its 100,000+ fans for 7 or 8 games a year along with the massive amount of merchandising revenue they generate, then what hope is there for Rutgers?

There are any number of reasons this matters but the most important is the simple fact that getting a college education has never been more expensive or more out of reach to the middle class than it is now.  When a school like Rutgers is draining other academic programs as well as the wallets of its students to pay for athletics, you have to question what it's trying to accomplish as an institution.  And Rutgers is hardly alone. Fully 90% of Division I schools are doing something similar though perhaps not at the same scale as Rutgers.

If you’re looking for another reason this matters consider Indiana University.  Though the school turned a small profit in its athletic program in 2012, about $276,000, it needed nearly $2.8 million in subsidies from the school and the students to get there.  In other words, it didn’t really turn a profit at all.  But let’s suspend that bit of reality and consider the impact of robbing Peter to pay Paul at Indiana.  Because there are no coincidences, that university recently announced that it is limiting all employees there to 29 hours or less of work each week as a way of avoiding the impact of the Affordable Health Care Act, a result it wouldn’t need to worry about if it would quit paying subsidies to its athletic program. Quality employees who have options will eventually leave IU for a school that offers them better benefits, like health care.  It's a topsy turvy world where school administrators fund a mediocre athletic program at the expense of the larger mission and the general welfare of the rest of the school's population.

The real benefactors of this insane race for athletic prominence and its increasingly illusory promise of pots of gold is undercutting the very reason these academic institutions allegedly exist.  The NCAA could do something about it though that would cut against its own economic interests.

I’m not sure exactly how Rutgers can sustain itself as a viable school, let alone a member of the Big 10, if it continues to run up such huge deficits.  Surely its board of trustees must be asking themselves that very question and if they aren’t they should be removed.  The same goes for virtually every school running at a deficit.  At some point some prominent school will drop out of the race either by force or by conscious, but it will happen unless there is a massive change in attitude and approach.  But as we’ve seen for so long, the NCAA traffics in the small problems like tattoos while the rest of the house is literally on fire.

**
The Browns have a rookie mini camp this week and if not for them signing a pile of undrafted free agents it probably could have been held inside a conference room in Berea rather than on the practice field.

To this point two of the draft choices have been arrested with one of them, Armonty Bryant, a serial offender.  I knew Joe Banner was following a rebuilding blue print from other teams, but I thought it would be the Philadelphia Eagles.  I didn’t realize it would be the Cincinnati Bengals.

**
Given the character issues that already have emerged with this Browns' draft class, this week's question to ponder: Does anyone in the Browns' scouting department know how to even do a Google search on prospective draft picks?

Lingering Items--They Aren't Who We Thought They Were, Either Edition

The controversy surrounding Pilot Flying J seems to change by the day.  What doesn’t is the impact any of it will have on Jimmy Haslam’s new toy, the Cleveland Browns.  It’s the great unknown.  Then again, it’s the Browns so what’s new?

The Browns have nearly cornered the market in unknowns so it’s not a huge surprise when it comes to the fortunes of the Browns that a corporate scandal involving the current owner of the Browns barely registers as a significant event anymore.  Maybe it should, assuming fans are still interested in seeing the Browns v2.0 actually succeed.

Here’s why this matters.  If you’re Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, who serves as an owner/CEO of Pilot Flying J, there’s a worst case scenario that ends up with him serving time for fraud.    Evidence could develop that implicates him in what essentially amounts to cooking the books to make the company look more profitable, putting him in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.  If that happens he could join an ever growing prison population of corporate fraudsters.   He could also find himself in the crosshairs of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his fellow owners who don’t want someone of his ilk mixing among someone of their ilk. In either case, it would most certainly put the franchise in flux once again.  In other words, it will be like the entire run of the Randy Lerner regime.

But there is no way to know at the moment how likely it might be for the worst case scenario to come to pass for Haslam.  I do know that Haslam and his team are staying up late, reading affidavits, making phone calls, and basically being embarrassed as each day they do so they uncover a little more ugliness that has caused Haslam to go from the defiant defender in his first press conference to the humbled executive in his last.  Put it this way, a company doesn’t announce a 5-point plan that involves an independent investigation, the suspension of several employees, a mea culpa on a few of the rebates and the impending hire of a Chief Compliance Officer if something hasn’t gone terribly wrong somewhere.  The only question now is the scope of the problem, not the existence.

To the extent that Browns fans should be worried about what’s happening at Pilot Flying J it’s less about Haslam personally and more about it rocking the financial underpinnings of the fortune both Haslam and the fans were counting on to support the franchise.  Fans in Cleveland already know what it’s like to have owners who don’t have the cash to play at the high rollers table.  We lived with Art Modell for years as he borrowed from one bank to pay off another while blaming the city for all his troubles.  We’ve lived with the Dolans now for years as they continue to obfuscate their own financial issues by crying about being a small market team.

The reason Haslam’s breaking a sweat at his press conferences these days is that the damaging blow to the company’s reputation and credibility directly translates to potentially less business as the Standard and Poor’s rating agency warned.  Less business means less cash to meet its expenses, including an ever increasing debt load that must be serviced.  Pilot Flying J is privately owned, mostly by the Haslam family.  A private equity group owns a little more than a third of the company.  Twice in the last 18 or so months it has taken on relatively heavy debt in order to finance a dividend payment to the owners.  The financings have been used for a variety of purposes—to pay down other debt incurred from acquisitions, for general corporate purposes and to put money in the pockets of the owners.  Some of that money, perhaps a good deal of that money, was used by Haslam to fund his purchase of the Browns.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that nor is there anything the least suspicious about it.  Taking on debt to fund a dividend to the owners of a private company is pretty common.  But that debt comes at a relatively high cost to ongoing operations.  Pilot Flying J’s corporate debt is rated below investment grade and may get lower, which means that it will be perceived as an even greater credit risk  That’s not unusual, particularly in businesses that sell fluctuating commodities like gas.  But to the investors that are funding that debt, they are taking on a higher risk and thus charge a higher interest rate.  It’s like an individual with a spotty credit rating trying to get a mortgage.  The bank might be willing to take the risk but it will charge a higher interest rate than it would to someone who is a much better credit risk.

Why this matters is that the company took on this debt confident that its business was strong.  It’s the largest operator of travel centers in the country and until about a week ago had a stellar reputation.  For the time being, that reputation is taking a mighty hit and so too will its business.  People don’t want to do business with those who might be cheating them.  If Pilot Flying J loses too much business it will have trouble meeting its debt payments and that in turn will make the entire company and hence Haslam personally more vulnerable to collapse.  And if Haslam collapses he’ll have to sell the Browns and on and on and on.

It’s too soon to speculate on the fortunes of Haslam, Pilot Flying J and the Browns but they are intertwined.  The only thing Browns fans should be worried about at the moment is how the front office will screw up this year’s draft.  Instead they should actually be worried about who might be the next owner of the Browns.  Calling Dan Gilbert….

**
Speaking of Dan Gilbert, he did a major about face this week when he re-hired Mike Brown to coach the Cavaliers.  Judging from the reaction on Twitter, this isn’t one of Gilbert’s more popular moods.  Gilbert must know how ridiculous it looks to have divorced Brown, quickly remarry and then find himself longing for his original bride.

No one really knows whether it was a mistake to fire Brown in the first place and/or whether that mistake has been compounded by rehiring him.  But there are other issues about this that should be talked about, not the least of which is whether Gilbert isn’t really some closeted version of George Steinbrenner and Brown is his version of Billy Martin.

If Gilbert really made a mistake by firing Brown it was because Brown used the leverage of the 10-day window in his original Cavs’ contract to force Gilbert to make a decision.  When the Cavs bowed to the Celtics three years ago in one of the weirdest, most miserable playoff efforts LeBron James will ever have, thoughts turned immediately to what it would take to re-sign James.  No one really knew because James wouldn’t say.  The speculation though was that James didn’t like Brown.  Meanwhile Brown had a contract with an option year that had to be declined within 10-days of season’s end or else that last year became guaranteed.  Gilbert wanted more time and Brown wisely said no.  That caused Gilbert to make decisions he now says he regrets.

Well, duh.  Gilbert regrets it because he didn’t really know what might make James re-sign.  More to the point, how James felt about Brown shouldn’t have even entered into the mix.  That it did caused the cascading effect of Brown being fired and the truculent Byron Scott being hired.  Here’s a lesson for Gilbert:  if you really are going to let the inmates name their own warden then you better be sure how they really feel about the current one.  Here’s another lesson for Gilbert: never let the inmates choose their own warden.

Will Gilbert follow either of these lessons?  That’s getting increasingly hard to say.  There’s so much talk these days (and hopefully it’s just idiotic media speculation) that a factor in the rehiring of Brown was the completely illogical supposition that it would play well with James and give the Cavs an enhanced chance to re-sign him if he opts out of his Miami contract after next season.  Oy.

Disregarding the illogic of this new theory, the truth is that the chances of James coming back to Cleveland will not rest at all on who is coaching the team.  Erik Spoelstra is the head coach of Miami for God’s sake and that was almost irrelevant to James.  What James knows better than the people who cover the sport for a living is that the head coach is the least important factor in the equation in the NBA.  Talent is the difference maker and James went to Miami because he was able to have his buddies play with him in Miami because they wouldn’t play with him in Cleveland.  James saw them and not Spoelstra as his ticket to a NBA crown.  Hitler could have been the head coach and it wouldn’t have matter.  James was right.

James will return to Cleveland only if it suddenly becomes his best chance to continue to win championships.  There isn’t a sentimental bone in his body.  He’s driven solely by the need to win championships and he knows that it takes an abundance of talent not an abundance of coaching to make that happen.

Where a coach makes a big difference in the NBA is on a team like Cleveland that is struggling to put together the pieces.  More victories can be squeezed out through good coaching.  The Cavs for example would have had a handful more of wins if the team had simply played better defense.  Brown will help with that.  It doesn’t mean that the Cavs will suddenly become contenders.  They won’t until the talent improves significantly.

I guess it’s nice that Brown’s back but I say that only because I’m not sure what the other viable alternatives really were.  Gilbert had no interest in taking another flyer and that left only a handful of other candidates every one of whom had at least as many warts as Brown.

I think the Cavs will be better next year because of Brown but that doesn’t mean they’ll be good.  If you want to worry about something, forget about James and worry about how Brown’s defensive emphasis will play with the Cavs’ next free agent in waiting, the defense-adverse Kyrie Irving.  If Irving eventually bolts like James will Gilbert get rid of Brown again?  Put differently, how many times did Steinbrenner fire Martin?

**

Another new regime making draft day decisions for the Browns is the source of this week’s question to ponder:  What is the most graceful way for the Browns to end the Brandon Weeden experiment?

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.

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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--Ownership Edition

There’s no real playbook for how exactly one goes about the business of actually owning a professional sports team except, of course, the requirement that you have or have access to plenty of money.  But once secured, the day to day job of owning a team is mostly a blank canvas.  Jimmy Haslam, the now-conflicted owner of the Cleveland Browns, apparently is still early on in feeling his way through the process and fans here are worried.

As you’ll recall Haslam gave up the CEO job at His Pilot Flying J truck stop empire in favor of doing whatever it is that owners of professional sports teams do.  In the few months he’s actually owned the Browns, that included quite a bit of activity.  He finessed Mike Holmgren out of town, he fired a general manager and hired another, he fired a coach and hired another, he met with city leaders and then, for good measure, he secured a nice little annuity for his team by selling the naming rights to its stadium for a 20 year term.  It was certainly more than 6 days of work.

But having crossed off those tasks from the mental list of “to dos” that he keeps, Haslam started to realize that there wasn’t much left for him to do at the moment particularly if he was going to allow the people he hired to run his football business to actually do their jobs.

So Haslam decided to push out the executive he just hired from Pepsico to run Pilot Flying J by giving him a different role and took back his old job of CEO.  It was kind of a ballsy move, actually, the kind we’re not used to seeing here in Cleveland.  Holmgren for example couldn’t muster the courage to fire Eric Mangini and put himself in as head coach when that was all he really wanted to do.  Indeed the Holmgren example is instructive.

One of the reasons Holmgren ended up being a lousy whatever the hell he was stemmed from his inability to see himself as anything other than a coach.  He lacked the guts to take the job himself when that would have served both him and the fans far better than hiring Pat Shurmur.  Holmgren thus dithered in a role he was ill suited to play, grew bored quickly and mailed in his job performance, figuratively and literally.  In that sense and with that as a data point, maybe it is good that Haslam went back to what makes him happy.

But Haslam better become more sensitive to the fan base he serves.  Fans here don’t like finding out from the local newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee that he’s had a change of heart about how he spends his day.  They wanted to hear it first hand and didn’t.  Haslam owed this courtesy to the Cleveland fans he expects to support his now hobby and not to the citizens of Knoxville who were just getting to know the new guy at Pilot Flying J.

As to the move itself, Haslam is adamant that nothing has changed regarding his commitment to the team, telling the Plain Dealer that “I don’t think anyone would question our passion, effort, intensity or devotion to the Cleveland Browns and, candidly, to Northeast Ohio.  Our family has a tremendous investment, and we want to win as bad as anybody does up there and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win.”

Not a bad rejoinder to those who would question his commitment but it would have been more effective if he had not referred to the fans as “anybody..up there.”  It probably would have been the opportune time to start referencing the collective “we” and not remind everyone that depending on the route you take, there’s one possibly two states between where his team plays and where his real passion lies.

This is where we get into the whole “how exactly does one actually go about being an owner?” discussion.

In Cleveland the last two owners have had no other job beyond owning the team and I don’t think anyone would hold either up as a model owner or a model for Haslam to emulate.  Art Modell didn’t adapt to the idle time well so he tinkered and tinkered with the team, convinced himself that he knew as much about football as anyone on the planet, and set in motion a decades long course of losing everything he built because of it.  Randy Lerner on the other hand had an immense capacity for being bored perhaps the difference from Modell being the fact that at least Modell at one time in his life actually held a job.  Lerner was like the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy, dividing each day into increments of frivolity in order to make his spectacularly inane existence manageable.

I suspect that most owners in the NFL have some outside business interests that keep them busy during the down days of the NFL, meaning mid February through mid July, but on the other hand Haslam is now one of the very few owners in the NFL who has a completely separate full time job as CEO of a pretty good sized company.  That role requires him to satisfy a whole host of constituents, not the least of which are family members with sizeable stakes in said company.  In other words, Haslam as CEO requires a fair amount of attention to that task.

Does that mean Haslam is destined to become another crappy owner of the Browns?  Not necessarily but there is pause, isn’t there?  By default, Haslam won’t assimilate very quickly if at all in the local community.  In that regard, his “up there” comment is very telling.  Then there is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about—the management team he put in place to run the Browns in his absence.  Fans seem relatively sold on Joe Banner as, I guess, club president or whatever he’s calling himself, but are less so on Mike Lombardi who, whatever his title might be, is the guy populating the team with free agents and draft picks.

Haslam as absentee-owner (and a house in Bratenhal that he says he’ll occupy once or twice a week in season doesn’t make him resident) could work but at the very least the jump he made back to the family business was too soon.  Fans have not had an opportunity to get comfortable with the team Haslam put in place and given all of the other similar teams put in place before them there’s a pretty good chance that fans will never get comfortable with them.

I think Haslam owed it to the fans to stay the course he set out, basically promised, when he became owner.  It was a bit of a bait and switch and is now another reason for fans to think that this isn’t going to work out any better than anything else that’s been tried. The fans may not be right, indeed they usually aren't, but it's up to Haslam to prove them wrong and right now he hasn't made much of an effort to do that.

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Speaking of owners, the Cleveland Indians’ Larry and Paul Dolan are putting together a nice little offseason for themselves.  When they set out to rectify the chief criticism of them it should be noted.  And so it is that the Dolans have pumped an additional $20+ million into the payroll and hired an actual, honest-to-gosh successful manager for this upcoming season in an effort to rebuild fan faith and recapture fan enthusiasm.

For what it’s worth, it’s hard to tell really whether either of the Dolans are otherwise gainfully employed outside of their duties as owners.  They have investments certainly and other businesses but neither are acting as CEOs of other on-going concerns.  Has that helped or hurt the Indians, hard to say.  But I think the fact that they live locally assuage any concerns about their commitment to the town or team.  The concern with them has always been their financial wherewithal and their generally self-fulfilling prophesy way of running a team they purposely labeled small market so that they could justify running it in small market ways.

The Dolans haven’t become the Steinbrenners but no one expected them to.  But for the first time in years they have decided that reinvestment was needed, the growing number of empty seats around Progressive Field being a serious clue.

There’s no way of knowing at the moment whether the Terry Francono, Michael Bourn or Nick Swisher moves will bear fruit except in the Cleveland-curse sort of way that we know nothing ever works out like it should.  But rightful credit is due to the Dolans and to general manager Chris Antonetti for doing something.  They had to.  If the offseason had consisted simply of bringing in a washed up Jason Giambi and a weak armed Daisuke Matsuzaka, and we’ve had exactly those kinds of offseason in each of the last 10 years, then fans would have blown their brains out.  To put a sharper point on it, fans would have stayed away in even bigger numbers than last season and the Dolans would find themselves struggling to meet the modest attendance totals of the Indians circa any year prior to the move to what is now Progressive Field.

At this point there isn’t any question that the Indians are an improved team from the mess that was last season but just how improved is the real question.  Perhaps the biggest question though is whether this is a one year cash infusion or part of a multi year plan to actually reinvest in the franchise and get it back to where it can actually compete.

Where the Dolans have failed the fans in the past has been in not building on a previous season’s success.  That they have finally reinvested in the team is great and is applauded but it must be part of an overall attitude change and not a one time event or the alienation from the fans they feared for this year will simply be delayed by a year.

**

This all brings us to the last owner in town, Dan Gilbert.  He’s closest, perhaps, to the model that Haslam seems to be adopting.  Gilbert is a Detroit person through and through but what he’s done to overcome the perception as an out of towner has been to move some of his business operations to Cleveland.  Jimmy, are you listening?

The other thing though is that Gilbert, in the various enterprises he has going including the new casino, is perhaps the most distracted owner in town.  Has that negatively impacted the Cavaliers?  Hard to say and the reason it’s hard to say is that the NBA is by far the toughest league in which to build a team back up from the bottom.

The NBA’s history is irrefutable at this point.  Once a team sinks to the bottom it’s at least a decade before it’s competitive again and that’s assuming competent management.  You can try to accelerate the timetable but it’s rarely been done.  The salary cap and the draft lottery combine in a unique way to keep bad teams down for as long as possible.  The Cavs seem on track in that regard.

The reason Gilbert seethed when LeBron James left had everything to do with the financial impact it would have on Gilbert’s empire knowing this history.  With James out of the mix, the Cavs overnight became a bottom tier team with all of the bottom tier  perks that come with that status such as empty seats and decreasing revenues.  If the Cavs were a stand alone enterprise that would be one thing.  But the residual impact of those empty seats spills over to concessions and, more particularly, to a difficulty attracting casual gamblers to the Horseshoe Casino.  A full Quickens Loan Arena for 40+ winter nights a year translates to a lot of lost money at the gaming tables and slots.

Would the Cavs be further along if Gilbert were focused entirely on the Cavs?  Again, hard to say.  Gilbert, like Haslam, believes in hiring professionals to run the business while providing oversight that hardly requires a 24/7 level of concentration.  So Gilbert’s success, like Haslam’s, will depend fully on whether the general managers they have on hand are up to the challenge.

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A popular question floating around this past week, given the Indians' moves, has been which local team is closest to the playoffs? The better question and this week's question to ponder is which local team is the furthest?