The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Lue wants results after players-only meeting
When the storm is at its worst, when the boat is springing leaks at the bow, the stern, starboard and port side and bailing is futile, there is only one thing a team can do: Call a team meeting. Team meetings work only temporarily, like an aspirin, to relieve the pain of losing when the players in the meeting are inferior to the competition. But when the team is the defending NBA champion, the meeting could be a wakeup call.
The Cavaliers had one of those meetings after losing to the Bulls in Chicago on March 30. The loss was their third straight and fifth in seven games.
Coach Tyronn Lue, who during his playing career sat in a handful of those players-only meetings, is a little skeptical. He wants to see results before calling the get-together in Chicago the session that saved the season.
“Guys got together in Chicago last night,” Lue said March 31 before the Cavs played the 76ers at Quicken Loans Arena. “They had a good talk among themselves. Now we have to move on and play.
“We’ve done enough talking over the last couple weeks. Now we have to settle in. We just have to play.”
The Cavs were 6-10 in March before playing the Sixers.
Any hope of finishing with the best record in the league vanished long ago. For now that honor belongs to the Warriors, who were 61-14 before hosting Houston on March 31.
The Cavs are just trying to regain the top spot in the East. They trailed the Celtics by a half game before action March 31. A month ago it seemed unthinkable the Cavs would be scrambling to repeat as conference champions.
“Every journey’s different,” Cavs guard Kyrie Irving told reporters in Chicago after the meeting. “When you’re in it, it absolutely
sucks, when you’re in a rut like this. We’re taking steps forward. After the game, we took a step forward in a way that a team should take a step forward when we’re in a rut. I’ll leave it at that.
“It’s ugly right now. It’s real, real ugly. But we’ll get out of this. We’ll be fine.”
That seems to be the prevailing thought in the Cavs’ locker room — “We’ll be fine.” The Cavaliers seem to have the attitude that, as long as they having Irving and LeBron James and Kevin Love, all they have to do is decide to play to their capabilities and they’ll be fine.
Interestingly, this has been going on for weeks — really since the calendar
flipped to 2017.
The Cavaliers were 7-8 in January and 9-2 in February. So since Jan. 1 they are 23-20. That’s just a tick better than mediocre for more than a half season.
Eight days after Andrew Bogut suffered a broken leg in his first minute of action as a Cavalier on March 6, the Cavs signed center Larry Sanders, who last played in the NBA two years earlier. General Manager David Griffin used that occasion to calm the fears of fans who noticed their favorite Wine and Gold team was not playing like champions.
“I’m concerned in so far as I’d like to see us start to actually act on the things we know we need to do,” Griffin said. “But I’m not
concerned so far as it reveals anything about us having real deficiencies. What we have is a lineup that’s been really hodgepodge because of all the injuries. So I’m concerned that we haven’t been winning. Certainly we want to be doing more than that. But I’m not concerned with what it means for us long term.”
More than two weeks later, the Cavaliers were concerned enough to call a team meeting. It will take more than a game against the lowly 76ers to know whether the meeting had any results.