There are a lot of different directions I considered going with this bazooka point. Ultimately, I decided on an element of the defense that was exposed as a repeated weakness throughout today’s game: the inability to bring down the quarterback.
As a team, the Browns have 14.0 sacks on the year. Since, unbelievably to me, I can’t find an easily accessible list of NFL team sack leaders, I’ll compare that total to the team’s most immediate competition. The Ravens have notched 16.0 sacks thus far in 2010, and the Steelers blow both teams away with 24.0. As I’m writing this, the Steelers’ defense has just stepped on the field for the first time in the Sunday Night Football game, so that gap will likely grow even wider before week 10 ends.
This may not seem like it’s all that relevant a discrepancy. A minus -2 sack differential between the Browns and the Ravens? However, what I do NOT have is that stat that would be much more helpful: missed sack opportunities.
To me, this became, if not the most serious deficiency in today’s game, then certainly in the top 3. The team ended a game that went 74:44 with a grand total of 2.0 sacks. But I’d have to review game tape to tally the number of times Browns defenders *almost* brought down Mark Sanchez in the backfield, but couldn’t…quite…make the tackle. In many cases, they even managed to lay hands on Sanchez, but not actually sack him.
Shaun Rogers ended the game as public enemy no. 1 on this front for me; I think you could plausibly make the argument that his inability to take down Sanchez inside the Jets’ own 5 yard on 3rd down in OT was just as critical an error as Stuckey’s fumble inside field goal range a few minutes earlier.
This isn’t necessarily fair to Rogers. There were certainly plenty of other Browns defenders who failed in an identical way throughout the game. And certainly, some credit should be given to the Jets’ offensive line and Sanchez’s ability to escape trouble. But that play in overtime became, in many ways, a symbol of what i would judge a season-long weakness.
At some point during the second half, I asked via Twitter whether the Browns were more in need of an impact WR, or a line-busting LB or DE who could consistently get to the opposing QB. Those two needs may still be 1A and 1B in the 2011 draft, but at least today, I would rank the defensive hole as the more important to fill. This overtime loss to the Jets would be exhibit A in my argument.
I don’t want to be overly glum. There were definitely positives to point to. Colt (that’s right, I said it) McCoy not only threw a game-tying TD in a two-minute drill, but also completed his 3rd consecutive game without throwing an INT. For my money, any suggestion that he’s not the starter for the rest of the year is insanity. The team took arguably the best team in the league down to the absolute wire in a thrilling game that I would never have thought possible 30 days ago. Hell, they even earned the moral victory of being deemed worthy of CBS’s early game of the week national broadcast.
So the team appears to be moving in the right direction. But today’s loss is a sobering reminder that they still need play-makers on both sides of the ball. Whether or not Tom Heckert manages to find them will determine whether or not they manage to take the step next season that they’re beginning to hint they’re capable of taking.
By the time anyone reads this article, LeBron’s second day of free agency meetings will have begun. He’s scheduled to hold court with the Clippers and Heat today, then the Bulls and Cavs Saturday. But Thursday was all about the NY/NJ metropolitan area—and shockingly, all sources from inside the Knicks and Nets indicate the meetings went “extremely well.”
Pardon me if I’m not sweating yet. And pardon me again if I go on to say that none of you Cavs fans reading this post should be sweating either.
As we here at Mesa have pointed out multiple times over the course of the past few weeks (via Twitter and in columns), generating excitement about a business prospect during a meeting falls somewhere between “producing saliva” and “crapping” on the scale of difficulty. I’m not even denying that the excitement in the room for the Nets and Knicks was genuine. But the reality is that unless one of these other teams walk out of the LRMR offices with a verbal commitment from James, the emotion in the room during a presentation is irrelevant.
Let’s also not forget that the pundits reporting about yesterday’s meetings were entirely basing their opinions on sources within the Nets and Knicks, most of whom probably weren’t even at the meetings in question. As a result, reporters and beat writers end up gushing in print about how great their chances of landing LeBron are—like this, for example. (Caveat: kudos to Rod Thorn for sounding like the voice of reasonable expectation in the midst of this blowjob of a report.)
Examining this situation rationally for a moment, consider this: what else are these partisan sources going to say? “You know, I gotta be honest, I thought our presentation sorta sucked”? “I’ll tell ya, LeBron seemed really disinterested”? “We couldn’t even get a meeting with Amar’e earlier than Monday and Rudy Gay already re-signed with Memphis. Why the hell would we have any chance at signing LeBron”? Something tells me that’s not going to fly if you want to remain employed by either of those organizations.
Second, what about any of LeBron’s media appearances since he was 16 would lead anyone to believe that he wouldn’t portray interest and enthusiasm in these meetings? Not only was the first of them led by one of his best friends and biggest role models, but this is a guy who declared that at one time or another he’s dreamed about playing for every team in the league, and that he’s been looking forward to this day (free agency) for four years. This is a mega-holiday for him. I’m convinced that today’s teams could give their presentations entirely in Korean, and LeBron would still be giddy.
Third, thanks to the information that’s out in the public realm about the Knicks’ presentation, I can say with knowledge that it was laughable. For starters, one of the supposed ringers the NYK brain trust brought in for the meeting was…Allan Houston, a guy whose greatest legacy in the league is as arguably the worst return on a max contract investment in NBA history. Houston missed a combined 94 regular season games in the 3rd and 4th seasons of that contract and retired before the start of the fifth. For that, the Knicks paid him over $20M per. My sources tell me that Donnie Walsh followed up his decision to include Houston in the meeting by flying to New Orleans to pitch the Saints’ brass on selling the Super Dome’s naming rights jointly to BP and FEMA.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Forbes got a hold of an actual piece of the Knicks’ presentation—a slideshow by a marketing consultant called Interbrand that claims LeBron has the potential to gross $2 Billion (yes, that’s a ‘B’) by playing the rest of his career with the Knicks. At the very worst, his signature on a Knicks’ contract would give him a 48.6% chance of grossing at least $1 Billion.
As Forbes’s Steven Bertoni points out in the article, “the report is light on the details of its methodology.” Having gone through the slideshow personally, I concur. The results seem to be based on…well, nothing tangible, other than the fact that James Dolan cut them a check to come to a specific conclusion. Interbrand claims that the findings were determined via a battery of computers running career projections based on a variety of factors, but the overall vagueness of the presentation creates the distinct impression of junk science (or technically, junk math. I wouldn’t want to confuse my junk).
Even funnier, the unintended take-away from this preposterous slideshow is that staying in Cleveland is actually a much more profitable decision for LeBron than anyone would have ever anticipated. Interbrand’s “study” shows that James’s maximum lifetime value in Cleveland is $1.176B, his lifetime average value is $699M, and his chance at making a billion dollars stands at 1.3%. By comparison among the other non-Knicks franchises included in the model (Chicago and Miami), Chicago would offer him a slightly higher maximum lifetime value ($1.233B), but a lower average value ($689M) and lower probability of grossing his first billion (1.0%). Miami is a distant fourth in all categories. In short, Cleveland is pretty clearly his second-best option behind the bumbling carnival side show that is the Knicks.
Considering that Dolan paid for this presentation, he may have wanted to suggest that Interbrand skew the findings even further than they’re already skewed. Telling LeBron he has any chance of grossing over a billion dollars by staying in his hometown, which is widely acknowledged by now to be neck-and-neck with Chicago as his chosen destination, isn’t necessarily a tactic I’d have recommended. But then again, this is why the Knicks have been an NBA afterthought for most of the past decade.
I also love the fact that the Interbrand “study” finds that LeBron has a 0% chance of making a bill in Miami because of “lack of fan avidity,” i.e. because no one living in Miami gives a shit about the Heat. I think it may be the only nugget of truth in the entire slide show. But that’s neither here nor there.
My final point as to why Cavs fans should remain calm: Pat Riley’s grand plan for wooing LeBron is going down in flames. According to reliable sources (and common sense, my favorite of all sources), Riley’s strategy hinged on getting verbal commitments from both Wade and Bosh to come to Miami before meeting with LeBron. As of now, that has not happened. Considering that Wade met with the Bulls today, and Bosh has been tweeting like a jackass about his meetings with Houston and New Jersey (with other meetings scheduled), it seems highly unlikely that King Slickback will be able to make that pitch as planned. Without commitments from those two players, the Heat have to try to sell James on living at South Beach with Mario Chalmers and Michael “Every GM in the League Thinks I Might As Well Be Made of Uranium” Beasley. Not exactly a strong hand, especially considering that if past history is any indication, the Heat might just retire James’s jersey even if he never plays for them.
In short, I still believe that the Cavs’ faithful have nothing to fear from the tri-state area, and all signs point to Miami and the Clippers being non-factors. Which means it will all come down to Saturday. Chicago Vs. Cleveland. Only time will tell if Dan Gilbert comes out of that match-up as the ownership equivalent to Craig Ehlo. But for today, at least, I believe we can all rest easy.
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 word when he said that he cared about winning championships above all else. Since that time James has mailed in a playoff series, refused to speak to the Cavs’ #1 coaching candidate, and made it clear through his actions that his main goal is to market himself to as many people as possible.
As a result, much of the evaluation I did was way off-base. And in fact, some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, like when I slammed the Clippers for thinking it was a good idea to go into this historic off-season having just fired their head coach and GM. I still think it’s a stupid move, but it’s a bit ironic considering that the Cavs ultimately ended up doing almost the same thing by firing Mike Brown and then letting Danny Ferry walk away at the end of his contract.
Suffice it to say that if I were to write those same posts again today, I would come up with very different results. In some sense, that’s what I want to do right now, but only in one case—and really, in one aspect in particular.
The case would be the New York Knickerbockers. The aspect would be their head coach, Mike D’Antoni.
When I wrote my Knicks Cap Reality post in February, I had this to say about D’Antoni:
Even more importantly, is it even possible to build a championship team when it’s being coached by Mike D’Antoni, perhaps the least defensively minded coach in recent NBA history? I’ve heard analysts say that LeBron would love to play for him because D’Antoni would let LeBron run all game. Not only does Bron not care about running all game, he’s openly said over and over again that he knows defense is what wins championships. So why exactly is the D’Antoni / New York combo such a great fit for him?
Last weekend, I started reading Jack McCallum’s 7 Seconds or Less, his book about the 2005-6 Phoenix Suns. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Suns granted McCallum full access to basically all team functions as a nominal “special assistant” to the coaching staff that year. He was in the locker room, on the practice court, on the team plane—basically, everywhere the team went from the first pre-season practice through the end of their playoff run.
McCallum provides a revealing behind-the-scenes view of the personalities on the team, from the players to the coaching staff. In fact, the coaches are in many ways the stars of the book. And of course, D’Antoni is the featured attraction among this set.
I now have a much better sense of why D’Antoni has been pitched as the ultimate “player’s coach.” I have to say that it sounds like he deserves the title. He’s almost relentlessly positive with his team, and at the same time, does a tremendous job of bonding with them. For instance, McCallum makes a point early in the book that D’Antoni has been known to play video games with the players prior to regular season games, and that the players absolutely love this. (He also happens to be pretty freaking hilarious, which is generally a great quality for whatever you’re doing.)
Above all, D’Antoni’s offensive system is (theoretically) most players’ dreams. As long as they adhere to the principles at its core, the players have carte blanche to operate as they see fit within that offense. It’s telling that at one point during their playoff series against the Lakers, the Suns are floated a page from a Lakers’ assistant’s scouting report that was left behind in a hotel room. The neon quote from the scouting report was, “In Phoenix’s offense, literally nothing is frowned upon.” Admittedly, this isn’t true. Isolation plays, for instance, would be frowned upon in the Suns’ offense. But D’Antoni and his coaching staff loved this quote so much that they would insert it into practices and huddles as a kind of tongue-in-cheek sign-off. (“OK guys, go out there, match their intensity, be smart, and just run the offense. Remember, literally nothing is frowned upon.”)
However, here’s the other element that’s worth mentioning: throughout the book, D’Antoni talks a good game regarding defense. He spends time and energy going over it in pre-game meetings, at half-time, in practice. He’ll pitch defense to his players as the key to winning games. In short, the man knows how to pay the concept lip service.
That said, in private, his answer to everything is that his team just has to score more. For instance, Amar’e goes down with a knee injury early in the regular season—the opening salvo in the history of knee injuries that has turned Stoudemire into a certified health risk. Not for a moment does D’Antoni suggest that maybe the team should try to fill the void left by Amar’e by defending better or changing their style of play in any way. Instead, he immediately decides that they just need to amp up their scoring.
McCallum also makes a point that D’Antoni’s mind is basically made up about basketball at this point. He knows what he believes, and what he believes is that fluid offense and quick quality shots are the best way to win games. It’s not that defense doesn’t play a part in D’Antoni’s game plan; it’s just a really small part. He also tends to apply it selectively to a few guys. In the 2005-6 season, Raja Bell and Shawn Marion were the guys who were expected to go out and play stellar defense night in and night out. The rest of the team? They should try. But you know, if it didn’t work out, just keep scoring.
In my opinion, this is the perfect storm for a coaching pitch to James. Not the defense-minded James who wanted to win multiple championships, AKA the James of February 2010, but rather the James who wants to put up gaudy numbers, be the center of the greatest show on hardwood, and ultimately, not be challenged by his coach, AKA the James of Now and Forever. D’Antoni can sell James the idea that he does care about defense, and the James of public record can believe him and feel secure knowing that he’s in good hands. In reality, though, both men will know what the story is: D’Antoni will inflate James’s offensive numbers to historic proportions, and if he wants to defend, by all means go for it. It’s James’s show.
This last trait is the most important one. Woj and Ric Bucher have been adamant that James essentially believes that any improvements he needs to make to his game are going to be best determined by him. Coaches aren’t going to teach him anything. This is exactly the type of mindset that D’Antoni would bring to the table. He will be LeBron’s friend. He will laugh and joke and talk with LeBron. He will urge him to shoot, to pass, to run, to put on a show. And yeah, ok, every once in a while, to defend. But by and large, he will let James operate as James wants to operate. I suspect this will even apply when LeBron suddenly decides late in games that he wants to stop the ball and go 1-on-5 (AKA the fantastically mislabeled “Mike Brown’s offense”). Will this run counter to D’Antoni’s instincts as a coach? Absolutely. But as far as I can tell, he’ll let it go in exchange for three quarters per night of D’Antoni offense.
What does this all add up to? In my opinion, it may make the Knicks the leader to sign James. I honestly believe that. Look, he’s not going to Jersey to play for Avery Johnson. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical that he’s going to play in Chicago for Tom Thibodeau. And I ultimately believe that he doesn’t necessarily want to try to make it work with Dwyane Wade in Miami, because he knows Wade would still be the Alpha Dog there. Under Mike D’Antoni, the Knicks seem to offer what the real LeBron James cares about: the spotlight, the money, the numbers, and free reign to do as he pleases on the court.
Can D’Antoni win championships with James, though? Time will tell. But I for one am beginning to believe that time may be the only thing preventing us from knowing that answer.
Continuing my series on the sordid realities of the teams vying for LeBron this summer, I want to take a look at the Knicks tonight. As you can probably surmise from the photo I’m pairing with this post, I don’t think much of their chances.
This is actually a much simpler analysis than my opening salvo on the Miami Heat. The reason is that the Knicks, to put it in the simplest terms, have cap space and almost literally nothing else.
As Joe Treutlein of Hoop Data details here, Donnie Walsh’s moves at the trade deadline give the Knicks enough cap space to sign two max free agents by the slimmest possible margin. Assuming a buy-out of Eddie Curry and a $53M cap, a mere $50,000 separates New York from joining the list of teams with room for only one max contract.
However, if Spike Lee has any iota of realism in him, he shouldn’t be dancing in the streets just yet. Why? Because to get to this zone, New York’s roster will be populated by these players:
Danilo Gallinari
Wilson Chandler
Toney Douglas
10 players making the league minimum
Without even getting into the performance of those three hold-overs from the 2009-10 season, think about this fact. Even if those players and the two max free agents actually fill out a workable staring line-up, literally every player coming off the New York bench will be making minimum money. Like Pat Riley, Donnie Walsh is therefore banking that quality role players around the league will voluntarily take less money so that they can play with whomever they get as their big-money stars.
As we’ve said over and over again, this is a terrible gamble. It was a bad gamble last summer, and I would argue that it’s an even worse gamble this upcoming summer due to the gathering storm clouds of a 2011 work-stoppage. Any player looking to sign a new deal this summer is going to be prioritizing dollar value more than ever before. So instead of a bench full of skilled role players, the Knicks are most likely going to end up with ten minimum salary guys in the truest “you get what you pay for” sense of the word.
This is a bigger problem than a lot of people want to recognize. LeBron and Dwyane Wade share something that none of the other major 2010 free agents do—they’ve both been to the Finals. LeBron got manhandled there. Wade (thanks to the greatest collection of phantom calls in league history) won. But both players are smart and experienced enough to understand the necessity of a good supporting cast to winning a championship.
“Supporting cast” as a phrase gets distorted pretty frequently, I think, to mean “1 or 2 other guys who can get 20-25 points.” But as people who really watch basketball know, there’s a lot more to it than that. You need shooters, gritty defenders, big men, “energy / hustle” players, rebounders, fighters. The Knicks’ chances of filling out a roster full of true complementary pieces using only the veteran’s minimum…they’re weak, especially in the first year. And LeBron knows it.
There’s a long debate that could be had about which is better: playing with one other star and a bunch of scrap, or no other stars but a roster full of reasonably priced, highly productive role players. A lot of it, I think, depends on how you define “better.” But I would argue forcefully that in the case of a superstar of LeBron’s capabilities, the latter option gives him the best odds of winning a title.
Might Donnie Walsh ultimately be able to build a complete team around LeBron? Yes. But how many years will it take? And with LeBron now used to a certain level of success (and hungry for the big prize), how appealing is the idea of waiting around for a couple of years to get a championship-ready team in place?
Even more importantly, is it even possible to build a championship team when it’s being coached by Mike D’Antoni, perhaps the least defensively minded coach in recent NBA history? I’ve heard analysts say that LeBron would love to play for him because D’Antoni would let LeBron run all game. Not only does Bron not care about running all game, he’s openly said over and over again that he knows defense is what wins championships. So why exactly is the D’Antoni / New York combo such a great fit for him?
So with a roster as unexciting as this, the other two crutches the New York fans / media fall back on are the dual myths of “New York as the Mecca of Basketball” and the “New York as Key to Endorsement Success.” The problem with the former is that it’s all hot air. As we’ve pointed out before, New York has won two NBA titles in their history—1970 and 1972—and since that time plenty of great players have been content to scratch their Madison Square Garden itch by coming into the building once a year and beating up on the home team.
The problem with the marketing myth is that it’s not even just hot air—it’s blatantly, factually false. Kenny Huang, the incoming minority owner of the Cavs, will give Bron the greatest possible inroad to the enormous market that is China. Even without Huang, James’s recent deal with McDonald’s already makes him the sport’s leader in endorsement money. As Kurt Badenhausen of Forbes reported when that deal was signed:
The McDonald’s deal should squelch any talk that James needs to leave Cleveland to be a big star with big endorsement deals. James is already a huge star and has multi-million deals with the biggest global brands in shoes (Nike), beverages (Coca-Cola) and now fast-food (McDonald’s). Knicks fans might want to start preparing for reality. LeBron doesn’t need New York to become a global icon. Cleveland will do just fine.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Prediction: Knicks overpay Rudy Gay and another second-tier free agent and follow the model of the mid-2000s Washington Wizards—perennial playoff team that goes nowhere. Donnie Walsh follows Joe Dumars in the ranks of “GMs that everyone finally realized were horrendously overrated.” Bron continues to play at MSG once a year in a way that drives Mike, my dad, and me crazy.
