Yesterday I made the mistake of listening to a Bill Simmons podcast with Chad Ford thinking that I was actually going to hear new information about the Ricky Rubio debacle in Minnesota. I did, but only for about 20 minutes. Simmons and Ford then weaved through a couple of different NBA topics before rehashing in full a debate they had the week of this year’s draft.
The topic, of course, was where LeBron should play starting next season.
I feel like there are only a limited number of columns we at Mesa can write about this issue befor we’ve covered every possible point. However, we haven’t reached that quota yet.
Here are the main points Simmons and Ford agreed on in the podcast:
1) It’s bad for LeBron’s career to stay in Cleveland because it’s unlikely he’s going to reach “multiple Finals” with them
2) LeBron’s remarks about being “loyal to Akron” were primarily put out there to distance himself from Cleveland and the Cavaliers organization
3) Danny Ferry has completely fumbled the strategy for building the Cavs around LeBron, especially in comparison to how Sam Presti has built the Thunder around Kevin Durant
4) The most intriguing possible destination for LeBron next summer - in terms of both exposure and talent pool - is the LA Clippers
I’ll address points 1 and 2 quickly so that I can spend the majority of my energy on points 3 and 4.
First, the idea that LeBron’s staying in Cleveland is going to prevent him from reaching multiple Finals is just a dumb argument to make from the standpoint of numbers. He’s already been to the Finals with the franchise once. If you’re a detractor, you can blame that on whatever you want. You can say the Pistons choked away the Eastern Conference Finals. You can say the East as a whole was pathetically weak that year. You can say that Mike Brown made a deal with Beelzebub.
But whatever excuse you want to use, you can’t deny the fact that the Cavs were actually IN the Finals. So to say that LeBron will not make it to multiple Finals with the Cavs is to say that they will never again reach the Finals, since that would make two trips with this team.
Considering that most analysts have almost universally agreed that the Cavs are improved this year with Shaq, it seems like our chances of making it back to compete for the Larry O’Brien trophy are about as strong as reasonably possible.
The one issue that people seem to harp on is the “chemistry” issue, i.e. will Shaq’s moodiness screw up the undeniably good chemistry of the Cavs’ locker room and submarine the season in the process?
Here’s the thing: I believe that chemistry is overrated. If your team has it, that’s a great bonus. But no one talked about what great chemistry all the Jordan-led Bulls teams had in the ’90s when they won 6 titles. No one believed that the chemistry in the Lakers’ locker room was the secret ingredient that led them to three championships in the early ’00s. The Cavs’ organization isn’t trying to dominate a science fair. They’re trying to win basketball games.
How do you win basketball games? The simple answer is that you put the best possible basketball players on the court.
As Jeff Van Gundy has stated on NBA telecasts before, you don’t need all the guys on the team to go out to dinner or see movies together or call each other on their birthdays in order for a team to work. You just need them to practice together and play together every game. What happens outside of that is an accessory.
As for point #2, every basketball fan out there should know better than to try to read between the lines of a Bron quote fed to the media. From now on, I’m going to use the term “Fortitude South” to describe this entire campaign of coyness Mr. James carries out re: his future plans. For non-WW2 buffs, “Fortitude South” was the code-name for the decoy invasion the Allies set up to distract the Germans from Normandy. The operation consisted of the Allies’ stocking Kent, England with inflatable tanks, inflatable landing crafts, fake radio broadcasts, and general misinformation to make the Nazis’ scouts and spy planes believe the “real” invasion point was Pas-de-Calais. Obviously, it wasn’t. The Allies laughed all the way to VE-Day, and the Nazis looked like fools.
By no means am I calling Ford or Simmons a Nazi. I’m just saying that in terms of people getting fooled based on visible evidence, expect something similar here.
If you want to talk about quotes relevant to Bron’s free agency, try this one, which the national media managed to somehow miss or misconstrue:
“I’m excited about the upcoming season and I have never given any indication that I’m leaving Cleveland,” James said. “I’ve been happy with what the franchise has done for me and my family. It’s been great. Hopefully everything goes right and hopefully I can sign a big contract to stay in Cleveland.”
Shockingly, as I was searching around for a page to link to for that quote, all of the national media sources that I saw running a blurb about the quote were cutting out everything except the very last sentence. If you read that without the rest of the context, it sounds a lot weaker.
I’m not foolhardy enough to believe that this is a great indicator that Bron is staying, mind you. But if you’re going to try to base your argument on recent sound bytes, tell both sides of the story.
This leads us to point #3: the Danny Ferry / Sam Presti comparison.
The core of Simmons’s / Ford’s argument goes like this: Ferry screwed up the Cavs by trying to stock veteran talent so the team could win now. Instead, he should’ve taken the approach that Presti is using with the Thunder, which is to forsake winning now for the purpose of loading the team with young talent that can grow and improve alongside Kevin Durant. That way, when it’s time for Durant to consider free agency, he’ll say, “We’re just getting good. I can’t possibly leave now.”
This all sounds fine in principle, but there are legitimate problems with this argument when you look closer.
First, Sam Presti was the GM of the Sonics at the time they drafted Durant in 2007. LeBron, as we all know, was drafted in the summer of 2003. He’d played two full seasons in Cleveland before Ferry was given the reins to the team.
In 2003-4, the Cavs went 37-45, finished 5th in the Central and 9th in the East. In 2004-5, they won 42 games and missed the playoffs on a tie-breaker. They fired Paul Silas in March 2005 and canned Jim Paxson the day after their season ended on April 20th. Danny Ferry and Coldstone Mike Brown took over in the summer of 2005.
Here’s a look at the Cavs’ roster at the end of the 2004-5 season:
LeBron, Jeff McInnis, Dajuan Wagner, Sasha, Z, Robert “Tractor” Traylor, Lucius Harris, Ira Newble, Andy Varejao, Eric Snow, Jiri Welsch, Scott Williams, DeSagana Diop, Drew Gooden, Luke Jackson.
Not exactly an All-Star team. In fact, with the possible exception of Z and Drew Gooden, it’s arguable that there is not a single tradeable asset on the roster other than LeBron. (We have to remember that Andy was a completely untested player when he came over to the Cavs at the end of the season.) Realistically, we should also take Z off the table because he was still viewed by many in the league as a gamble due to his chronic foot problems.
What other assets did they have to build around Bron? How about the draft?
Well, Ferry had no draft picks in 2005 because Jim Paxson had already traded them away. The same was true of 2007. So in 2 of his first 3 years as GM, Ferry had no draft picks to work with because of his predecessor’s bad moves.
It also can’t be overlooked that LeBron’s rookie contract was set to expire in the summer of 2006. ‘Bron had gotten within an eyelash of the playoffs for the first time in his career just a few weeks before Ferry was given the reins.
During the summer of 2005, the Cavs were also one of the only teams with enough cap space to sign a major free agent to pair with LBJ. This eventually resulted in the ill-fated Larry Hughes signing. But it’s unfair to Danny to omit the fact that Hughes was clearly his last choice of the available big-name guards that summer. Ray Allen was his #1 priority - but Ray took more money to re-sign with Seattle. Michael Redd was his #2 priority - but Redd took more money to re-sign with Milwaukee. Any of this sound familiar?
Hughes then became the last available “marquee” free agent wing player. As Brian Windhorst has written (in a very detailed and even-handed review of Ferry’s ups and downs as GM), the Cavs arguably had no choice but to make a deal happen with him. It would’ve been disastrous in the arena of public opinion for Ferry to go into a summer with $28M in cap space and come out with no one who could be seen as a player of consequence. The new front office would’ve been neutered before it had even had a chance to really move in.
Given all those circumstances, it’s borderline insane to argue that the Cavs had a real opportunity to institute the type of rebuilding program that Sam Presti embarked on. It was critical that the Cavs won something - even the 8th seeded playoff berth - in 2005-6 in order to convince LeBron to sign an extension that summer.
By contrast, Sam Presti was hired as the GM of the Sonics in June 2007. By that point, Seattle knew that they had the #2 pick in the draft, which would be one of two college players - Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. The Blazers - ahead of Seattle at #1 - chose Oden, and the Sonics ended up with their new franchise cornerstone in Kevin Durant.
At the end of the 2006-7 season, the Sonics’ roster included these players: Ray Allen, Rashard Lewis, Luke Ridnour, Chris Wilcox, Earl Watson, and Nick Collison - each of whom had some level of trade value.
On draft day, Presti proved that trade value by flipping Allen to the Celtics (along with just-picked Glen Davis) for Delonte West, Wally “Hot Potato” Szczerbiack, and Jeff Green. He let Lewis walk away to Orlando as a free agent, and eventually dealt both Ridnour and Wilcox. Watson’s name was discussed in trade rumors of different levels between Presti’s arrival and the time OKC cut him this summer.
Collison is still on OKC’s roster. His career stats show per-36 minute averages of 12 points and 10.2 rebounds, with an effective FG% of 56.9%. I mention this just to support the notion that he would definitely have been worth something on the open market as well.
In addition, Presti should have had inside knowledge that the Sonics franchise would be moving to Oklahoma City in the summer of 2008. This is important because it negated any fear of local public opinion. Basketball fans in OKC would be thrilled to have ANY roster, and any negative reactions from the Sonics’ faithful would be irrelevant in 12 months anyway. As a result, Presti was in a rare circumstance for any GM: he essentially had a 2 year window before his decisions could come under any scrutiny at all.
In other words, he was in exactly the opposite scenario as Danny Ferry when he first took over as GM.
My last point on this topic is that reloading via the draft is a gamble - not just in basketball, but in any sport. If you’re consistently able to draft good players, you’ll look brilliant. On the other hand, a couple of miscues and you’ll look like a complete ninny. Anyone with even casual knowledge of basketball can immediately recall horrific draft moves: Bowie over Jordan, Darko over Melo, Marvin Williams over Chris Paul, and on and on.
The Thunder have either been fortunate or good enough to draft players over the course of the past two seasons that people believe will be very good pros, and this ends up being a foundation to Simmons and Ford’s insistence on Presti’s brilliance.
However, it’s also worth noting that some of those guys are not actually good pros yet. Analysts are gushing about James Harden right now, but he hasn’t played a single NBA game. Russell Westbrook has the “tools” and athleticism to be a special player, but last season he only shot 40% from the field and a dismal 27.1% from 3. Per 36 minutes, he dished out 5.9 assists but turned the ball over 3.7 times a game - not a great ratio for your starting point guard. (For comparison’s sake, Chris Paul’s per-36 numbers were 9.6 AST to 2.5 TO).
Meanwhile, no one’s lauding Presti for drafting Serge Ibaka over Nicolas Batum, Mario Chalmers, and George Hill (two of whom were starters for their respective teams by season’s end, all of whom played significant minutes last year) - or for trading for “likeliest rookie stiff” BJ Mullens this summer.
Instead, he’s got the advantage of potential. No one has any clue how good these guys will actually be - but they’ve shown flashes. And for the time being, flashes are enough to stir the pot.
Meanwhile, the Cavs have the “misfortune” of known quantities.
Let’s look at an example. Simmons is especially fond of belittling the Cavs with the idea that Mo Williams is the best player LeBron has ever played with as a regular teammate. This is particularly interesting when you consider that last October, Simmons listed “You will regret not fully appreciating the Cavs for swiping Mo Williams” as one of his top 20 predictions for the 2008-9 NBA season - a column in which he also predicted the Cavs would win the Finals.
However, now that Mo has actually played a full season and gone deep into the playoffs, analysts have numbers they can look at and use against him. Russell Westbrook, Jeff Green, and James Harden, though, are all guys who play for a team that has won a combined 43 games in the past 2 seasons. They haven’t gotten within 30 wins of a playoff berth, so their potential is unlimited.
This column is running longer than I anticipated, so I’ll have to continue the analysis later this week. Suffice it to say that I will focus further on roster comparisons - especially with the vaunted, exciting, “intriguing” LA Clippers.
Til then.
-T
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