Stepping Back Not Up

To those who counted on the Cleveland Cavaliers marching their way to a NBA title as some sort of inevitable climax to a special series, the series with the Orlando Magic provides an object lesson the cruelty of sports. Nothing is guaranteed, ever. Just because it may be your team’s turn doesn’t mean it is. Fate plays a part only in your mind.

The Cavaliers still have an opportunity to get to and win their first NBA championship this season, but they are in a rather sizable hole at the moment and they seem intent on trying to dig their way out when climbing would be much more effective. The reality though is that the Cavs and the Magic have now played 7 games this season and the Magic have won 5. The Magic simply are a better team. The question is why.

Going into this series, everyone expected it to be difficult. The Magic are the one team in the NBA that give the Cavs real match up problems. That the Cavs find themselves on the verge of having another season end too soon thus doesn’t so much surprise as disappoint. Man, does it disappoint.

But while Cavs fans quietly and begrudgingly lick their wounds they can rest assured in one thing: the best player in the NBA plays for them. No matter what the outcome of this NBA season, LeBron James has proven beyond any shadow of any doubt that he is not just the league’s MVP but its best player, no disrespect to Kobe Bryant intended.

The only problem for James is that his teammates have not found a way to step up their game the same way he has. Pick anyone from his supporting cast and you can find huge lapses in this series that run counter to the way he played the rest of the season.

Mo Williams, for example, hasn’t been awful in the Magic series, but he’s not been that missing link that he appeared to be all season. He’s played well in spurts and has played with some grit. But he’s also been surprisingly off far too often to be completely counted on. Offensively, his field goal percentage is down almost 15 points from his regular season average. Even more dramatic has been the drop-off in his 3 point shooting, where he’s hitting only 22% in the Magic series as compared to 43% in the regular season. Even his free throw percentage is suffering. He hit 91% in the regular season and his hitting only 85% in this series.

The same holds true for Delonte West. Both his field goal and three-point shooting are down in the Magic series vs. his regular season. Simply put he and Williams aren’t carrying their expected load.

But for my money, and that isn’t much, the biggest disappointment to this point has been Anderson Varejao. Maybe it was wishful thinking but this series seemed tailor made for Varejao’s coming out party in his free agent season. With everything to play for, I expected Varejao to simply give Dwight Howard fits. He hasn’t.

Varejao is playing almost exactly the same number of minutes in the playoff s generally and in the Magic series as he did during the regular season. While is rebound total overall is down 1 per game during the playoffs, it’s down almost 4 per game during this series. That’s a dramatic difference. Certainly it reflects the presence of Howard, but it also reflects a certain lack of effectiveness by Varejao. He’s demonstrating that for all the good he did this season, there are still significant moments when he disappears when faced with stiff competition.

James, on the other hand, isn’t just holding his own but is going beyond what he did in the regular season. That’s what the gifted do. They save their best for when it matters most. Whenever this season ends, James will have solidified his status as that once in a generation player that he surely is.

This isn’t to suggest that West, Williams or Varejao are choking away the series for the Cavs. Again, the Magic right now are a better team. But in part, maybe large part, the Magic are a better team precisely because West, Williams and Varejao haven’t yet made the full adjustment to life in the white hot spotlight.

For reasons that are as mysterious as they are unclear, the Magic’s players on the other hand have gone in the opposite direction. Despite a sometimes scattered approach, every one on that team has found a way to not only replicate what they’ve done in the regular season but to go beyond it.

Rashard Lewis, for example, hit 43% of his field goals in the regular season and 35% of his three-point attempts. Against the Cavs, he’s hitting 55% and 58%, respectively. Rafer Alston is doing likewise. During the regular season he hit 38% of his field goals and only 34% of his three-point attempts. Yet against the Cavs he’s at 45% and 43%, respectively. Same story for Mickael Pietrus. Both his field goal percentage and his three-point percentage are up dramatically in this series from what they were in the regular season.

No one doubts the pressure of these playoffs. It can do funny things to a person. It’s turning lesser talents like Alson and Pietrus into almost larger than life figures. Alston looks like the best shooter in the league. For his part, James can stand at the free throw line with literally no time remaining and make two free throws to send it into overtime and he looks almost casual doing it. West and Williams can get the same looks at the basket they’ve seen all season but can’t find a way to make the shots go down consistently.

When general manager Danny Ferry did his makeover of the team, it was done with the idea of winning titles not just respect. He’s done a good job of assembling talent but right now there are ingredients that are still missing. Despite his best intentions James is still carrying far too big of the load because the players he counted on during the regular season have been far less reliable when needed most. Who would blame him for passing up a pass he might otherwise have made?

This doesn’t mean that the Cavs need to undergo another makeover this next offseason, whenever it reminds. It just means that whatever improvement they make will be much more difficult. Williams and West, in particular, are extremely talented. The difference is mental and that’s the most difficult adjustment to make. Right now they are a like 2 handicap golfer trying to get to scratch. They have the tools but there are still more things they need to learn about course management and, by the way, they need to make a few more putts.

Whatever else this season holds for the Cavs, the one thing it’s held thus far has been the fans’ fascination. It’s the same fascination that Cleveland fans had for the 1995 and 1997 versions of the Indians. But those teams couldn’t win a title either for much the same reason this Cavs team is falling short at the moment. But if the Cavs do find a way to suddenly reverse course, there’s one thing in which to take great comfort: there will be no Jose Mesa-like meltdown. With James, the Cavs have the ultimate closer.

A Man of Action

The fiddling is over. Let the deconstruction of the move begin.

For those among us practically screaming for Cavaliers general manager Danny Ferry to do something to improve the team, his boldness in overhauling half of the Cavs current active roster was a refreshing slap in the face. With the NBA’s trade deadline on the verge of once again setting on Ferry and the Cavs, Ferry’s moves today signal that indeed he well understood that a roster shake-up was needed.

For most, it was enough just to hear that Larry Hughes was traded. You can imagine many, not just me, upon hearing the news that Hughes was traded think (and to paraphrase Lenny Dykstra upon hearing that Von Hayes had been traded), “great trade, who’d we get?”

For the record, the trade is as follows: The Cavs get Wally Szcerbiak and point guard Delonte West from Seattle and Ben Wallace, forward Joe Smith and a second-round draft pick next year from the Chicago Bulls. In turn, the Bulls get Drew Gooden, Larry Hughes and Cedric Simmons from the Cavs, while the Sonics get Ira Newble, Donyell Marshall and Shannon Brown. The Sonics also got Adrian Griffin from the Bulls.

No matter what your definition of dramatic may be, this trade certainly qualifies.

I’ll resist the urge to take credit for goading Ferry into making a move, mainly because that would be ridiculous. And wrong. What isn’t ridiculous or wrong is that Ferry was unquestionably feeling some heat, both internally and externally, to make a move to improve this team. Failing to execute this year probably wouldn’t have resulted in his losing his job, but it would have put him on very thin ice.

As it stood a few days ago, Ferry seemed poised to once again disappoint those within and outside the organization by his inability to pull the trigger on a move. The arguments, as expected, poured in that there just weren’t enough tradable assets to make a difference. Frankly, it’s an argument I never bought and for which I feel somewhat vindicated given today’s trade. After all the Cavs made the NBA Finals last year. It seems incongruous to suggest that there could not be a way to swing a trade in that context.

Indeed it was incongruous. Trades in the NBA are difficult because of the salary cap and its often bizarre exceptions and permutations. Contracts, both in length and value, have to be considered far more in the NBA than any other sport. But other teams always seemed to find a way to make it happen and now Ferry and his counterparts in Seattle and Chicago found a way to make it work. And by making this move right now, Ferry established himself as a credible general manager throughout the league in the process.

This isn’t meant to suggest that to this point he’s been a joke. It is to suggest, however, that he’s been mostly a non-entity, making a lot of phone calls, talking to a lot of folks, not doing much of anything. Despite the relative inaction, he’s mostly been given a pass because when you have a player like LeBron James, it covers up a lot of other sins.

There likely will be plenty of instant analysis to go around as to the merits of this trade in terms of how it improves the team this year and how it impacts its ability to maneuver down the road. At first blush, though, there is no question that this trade gives the Cavs a veteran presence and a toughness that for so long has seemed to elude them. Beyond those broad strokes, trades of this magnitude usually resist quick analysis. Whether or not this was the right deal is something that will play out over the rest of this season and resonate at least into the next one. It certainly is dramatic and has great potential. But for now, the Cavs have at least on the surface given its fans a reason other than whether James will win the MVP to stay engaged for the rest of the season.

This trade also demonstrates a strong commitment by Cavs owner Dan Gilbert. The Cavs have taken on a tremendous amount of salary by consummating this trade and also have limited much of the flexibility they thought they had going into next season. So what? It was going to happen at some point and there certainly was no guarantee that the supposed salary flexibility they had would have yielded any better results in the off season. By signing off on the trade, Gilbert let it be known that the “wait until next year” mentality that so often permeates Cleveland sports is not part of his operating philosophy.

But as with any change, particularly one of this magnitude, questions and more questions arise. Just a few for immediate consideration:

-Can head coach Mike Brown successfully integrate the new pieces with the old parts quickly and efficiently? It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. Clearly this will be Brown’s biggest challenge in his young head coaching career and will go a long way to determining Brown’s real mettle as a head coach in the NBA.

-To whom will the fans now direct their enmity? Stated differently, with both Larry Hughes and Donyell Marshall toiling elsewhere, who’s left to underachieve on such a grand scale? That’s actually hard to say. Hughes has been mostly a disappointment irrespective of his contract. Factoring that in, he’s been justthisshort of awful, always seeming to pull out a game or two that makes you think that he’s on the verge of breaking out, a sort of Kordell Stewart of the hardwood. Marshall never did provide much to get anyone excited about. In the pantheon that is the Cavs history, he’ll go down as one of the least memorable players of all time. Quick, what was his jersey number?

-What’s the impact on James? This will be hard to judge because almost nothing seems to impact James’ ability to perform on the court, no matter who he is surrounded by. Still, there is no question that James is more than just another player on this team. Virtually everything this franchise has done in the last few years has been with one eye on keeping James enthused about the team’s short, mid and long-term prospects. The strong guess is that while James had no official say in whether this trade got made, it was done with his tacit approval.

-How many air balls will Ben Wallace offer up from the free throw line in the post season? It was almost comical watching Wallace the last few years during the playoffs struggle with free throws. But he is an enforcer and does bring an attitude that the Cavs have had trouble projecting in the past. Put it this way, teams will now think twice about abusing James knowing that Wallace has his back.

There is no way to know whether this trade will make Cavs fans happy come June. Too many variables are at play, not the least of which is an incredibly strong Western Conference where there is every likelihood that a 50-win team won’t make the playoffs. But the Cavs are legitimately part of the conversation again, even if they weren’t very far outside of it in the first place.