July 2010
27 posts
5 tags
For the Love of Akron
And so it begins.
LeBron James is now a free agent.
Cleveland waits.
Plenty of scenarios have been bandied about. A super trio in Miami. A renewed legacy in Chicago. A date with the rapper and the Russian in New Jersey.
Now we get to see what actually transpires.
News earlier today that the Hawks were preparing to offer Joe Johnson a full max deal, threw the teams with cap space into a...
June 2010
29 posts
2 tags
The Knicks' Plan To Lure LeBron: Take a Pay Cut! →
If what Ian Thomsen is reporting is accurate, forget it. LeBron will not be going to New York.
As Windhorst tweeted earlier today, this idea that endorsements in NYC will make up the difference between a non-max deal and a max deal, or even a max deal and a Bird Rights max deal, is ridiculous.
In fact, if I were the Knicks’ owner, and Donnie Walsh came in and told me this was the best idea...
4 tags
Steve Greenberg of Allen & Co. on Gilbert and... →
Insightful - and comforting, if you’re a Cavs fan - look at Dan Gilbert and LeBron James from the perspective of Steve Greenberg, managing director of the investment firm Allen & Co.
This reminds of something Chris Broussard implied on an interview on ESPN. When discussing which team LeBron should sign with, too often we look at what’s there right now, without putting maximum...
8 tags
ESPN's Free Agent Summit = Abyss of NBA Knowledge
Since the Cavs broke off contract talks with Brian Shaw earlier today, I have no real news to discuss right now. Instead, I’m going to take this time to address a half hour of TV that thousands of sports fans watched tonight—ESPN’s Free Agent Summit. Or, as I like to call it, “4 Guys Ignore Reality for 30 Minutes.”
In case you missed it, the show consisted of...
3 tags
Hell Week Continues
Day 2 of Hell Week - shit, maybe Hell Month - continues for Cavaliers fans on Tuesday.
I came into Monday evening with two separate ideas for columns. The first was about how LeBron James is a difficult player to build around. The second was … pathetically, I can’t even remember what the second was.
Apparently, I’ve already given up the fight against Hell.
It doesn’t...
5 tags
Week of Answers? Doubtful
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what everyone in the basketball world has been waiting for.
This Thursday, July 1st, officially marks the start of free agency. Given the activity on the rumor / spin mill since the Cavs’ season ended last month, it’s hard to believe that there’s another gear that this can all go to. But there is, and starting 12:01 AM on Thursday, we’ll all...
2 tags
Pre-Draft Thoughts
Well, Chicago trading Kirk Hinrich and the 17th pick to Washington, opening up enough - or close to enough - money for two max free agents, certainly changes the landscape of everything.
(One caveat: I’ve read different things about whether this deal gets the Bulls to the $32M mark, and the official salary cap number hasn’t been set yet anyway).
Something is certain though. The...
3 tags
(Cavs-Centric) NBA Draft Preview
At 7 PM ET tonight on ESPN, the NBA draft airs. I’m perhaps stupidly excited about it, primarily for the likely flurry of trades I suspect will happen after the Wizards select John Wall at #1. History suggests there will be a lot of wheeling and dealing, and my prediction is that the Cavs will be involved in one way or another.
In case you haven’t been paying attention to the...
3 tags
My Brief Love Affair With Mo Williams (Pause)
This morning, I woke up to read a draft rumors article from Woj of Yahoo! Sports, saying that the Portland Trailblazers were showing a “strong interest” in Mo Williams.
How did I feel when I read this?
Encouraged.
Now let’s compare how I felt this morning with how I felt the day I saw on the bottom of the ESPN crawl in my apartment that Williams had been traveled to the...
Delay
The post I wrote last night didn’t publish when it was scheduled to, as a result of an error on Tumblr’s end. Hopefully it’ll be up soon. Sorry for the delay.
7 tags
2010 Cap Reality Series: the NYK Reversal
Some of our readers (though probably not many) may remember that a few months ago I did what I called a “Cap Reality Series” on some of the teams in the market to try to land LeBron this summer.
That series turned out to be a waste of time. Why? Because it was based on a complete misconception of James’s mentality and priorities. The primary error was that I took him at his...
2 tags
Major League Baseball Should Start Thinking...
In my opinion, Major League Baseball is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Not only is the pace of the sport very 20th century - a pretty significant problem since we are living in the 21st century - but the league also refuses to use technology that 5-year-olds are capable of operating, presumably because doing so would take away from the “purity” of the game. Well, as the great...
3 tags
Good Night to the 2009-10 Season
I originally wanted to look at all of the Finals stats and see if, averaged out over the 7 games, this series was really as wacky as it kept looking game to game. But as of right now (11:14 PM PT), none of our usual go-to sites for numbers has the game 7 stats live yet. So instead, I’m just going to address the larger question that these playoffs have now raised for me. I expect...
3 tags
Izzo Didn't Want It All →
I must say that these excerpts from Tom Izzo’s press conference yesterday are rather touching. They strike a chord with me personally, as I’ve had many of these kinds of conversations with myself, and with Tim, talking about home and family, ambition and adventure, the goals you set for yourself and the impact you might be able to have on others. There’s a point, I think, where...
Night Off
Instead of filling this blog with a useless post about nothing, I’m calling in sick. Quality over quantity … for now.
I’ll leave you with this. I heard from my mom today that Chuck Gileti, host of “Last Call”, which airs after Indians games on Sports Time Ohio, “looks like one of those guys you’d see with his shirt open and a medallion of Jesus.”
...
8 tags
Reptile in Chains(?)
In the Cavs’ front office tonight, one simple question sums up the past week and a half of work on their coaching search and their increasingly futile efforts (or so it seems) to re-sign LeBron.
“Now what?”
As everyone knows by now, Tom Izzo announced at a press conference on Tuesday evening that he has rejected Reptile’s “framework” offer of $30MM over 5...
3 tags
The Mounting Evidence Against Winning
Unfortunately, today, we saw LeBron James add more evidence to the mounting pile that this entire journey towards, and eventually into - god let it please come soon - free agency is NOT all about winning.
The latest news of course was that although James respects Tom Izzo as a coach, he has no interest in talking to him about the Cavaliers coaching vacancy. Presumably, this is because James...
6 tags
A Couple of Points About Izzo
As everyone who follows the Cavs already knows, Tom Izzo still hasn’t given ownership a thumbs up or thumbs down regarding the head coaching offer prepared by Reptile. Earlier today, Woj posted this article re: the source of the hold-up. In it, he makes a couple of points that I wanted to address briefly.
1) Izzo’s hesitation stems from his lack of certainty over who in the Cavs...
The World Cup - I Won't Soon Forget
I’ve been there. That’s right, four years ago I was traveling for work and ended up in Germany and The Netherlands during the World Cup. In 2006, Germany was actually hosting the tournament, so there were people from all nationalities roaming around the country, drinking and partying for close to a month.
Germany finished third that year, which wasn’t good enough for my...
1 tag
Indians Check-In
I’m guessing this might be the least read post of the week. Just having “Indians” in the header might cause some people to delete the Mesa bookmark from their browser or eliminate our feed from their RSS reader. Well, if you hadn’t realized by now … we’re not here to cooperate.
Also, in case you weren’t watching - and I’m going to assume you...
4 tags
Future Fear
An experiment is in progress.
As fans, we’re in the worst possible segment of the Cavs off-season—a combined period of rampant speculation and undeniable transition. Not only does the franchise have the crippling uncertainty of LeBron James, but they’re also searching for a head coach and trying to smoothly transfer power to Chris Grant as GM.
Looming over all of it like a...
1 tag
Happy Birthday to Us!
Mesa just turned 1! Big thanks to everybody who has visited the site and invested time in our hobby for the past 365 days. We’ll try to piss more people off in the coming year. Maybe we’ll make it on the radio. Or, the grandest of all accomplishments, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s morning sports blog round-up. Then we’ll know we’ve really made it.
5 tags
Mesa On Izzo
As everyone in the free world knows by now, Dan Gilbert wants to hire Tom Izzo to be the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. He wants Izzo so badly that he’s willing to pay him $30M over 5 years and even give him a private jet to use whenever he wants.
So what does Mesa think about all of this?
Well, I was pretty tempted to say that only one coach in the history of basketball has...
4 tags
Goodbye Danny Ferry, You Were Never Even Allowed...
As we all know by now, The Great Danny Ferry resigned his post as Cavs’ GM Friday morning. Dan Gilbert saw fit to promote Chris Grant to take over, and Lance Blanks will apparently stay on in an expanded role as well.
As I’ve pointed out previously (see the re-post a couple slots below), Ferry walked into the job in extremely unenviable circumstances. I would argue that the...
So, Baseball - WTF?
A funny thing happened last night in this whole LeBron fiasco - we decided to watch an Indians baseball game. (Well, just the last couple of innings, really). Now, this was interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, they actually won the game. Secondly, it reminded me of some curious issues with baseball that have confounded me for years.
So, forgive me for not talking about LeBron and...
6 tags
Cavs Trading With ... Golden State or Sacramento?
I haven’t heard anyone mention this yet, but yesterday on Michael Reghi’s radio show, Brian Windhorst all but said the Cavaliers are looking to make a deal to with, presumably, either Golden State or Sacramento that would involve trading a starter, to get into the lottery on June 24.
Windhorst implied that this move is something outgoing GM Danny Ferry didn’t approve of, but...
3 tags
Re-Post: Ferry vs. Presti →
In the wake of Danny Ferry’s resignation, I wanted to re-post a piece Tim wrote comparing Ferry’s moves with those of Sam Presti, a reaction to the universal lauding of Presti as the world’s greatest GM for doing what he’s done around Kevin Durant (as opposed to what Ferry did around LeBron).
The piece examines the situation Ferry was dealt when he got to Cleveland, which...
3 tags
The NBA Finals
I’m writing this before the start of Game 1 in Los Angeles. Here are my thoughts:
When I picked Phoenix to come out of the West, I didn’t anticipate Kobe Bryant shooting 47.7% from the field and 34.8% from 3P. I assumed he would shoot worse than he did in the regular season, not better. I was wrong.
In retrospect, it was probably stupid to bet against Kobe. Yes, I know this is an...
7 tags
"The Summit": Strategy, Fantasy & Reality
Here are three words I never want to hear in sequence again: Free. Agent. Summit.
It probably goes without saying that I’m referring to the fabled meeting of the minds first advertised by Dwyane Wade about a week ago—a not-so-secret session where the supposed best and brightest of the 2010 free agent class (James, Wade, and Joe Johnson) would hold court over what the future would hold for all of...
4 tags
The Fair Weather Fan
As Tim and I have been talking about how to handle the site this summer, in the wake of an Indians team that has almost nothing interesting going on, a Cavaliers offseason that will likely be dramatic and chaotic (but also only sporadically insight worthy), and a Browns preseason that, truthfully, seems entirely unappealing right now, two days before the start of the NBA Finals, I got to...