PAYING THE PRICE
CAVALIERS NOW PAYING THE PRICE FOR BAD ROSTER DECISIONS, FRONT-OFFICE TURMOIL IN RECENT YEARS
Past errors and turmoil are coming back to haunt the Cavaliers.
CLEVELAND — The Cavaliers’ front-office chaos of last summer looks to be blowing up in owner Dan Gilbert’s face.
The architect of the 2016 championship, general manager David Griffin was allowed to walk away. A drawn-out and unreciprocated flirtation with Chauncey Billups led to the decision to settle on Koby Altman, who was made the second-youngest GM in the league. Whether ready or not after five years of NBA personnel experience — and right now the answer appears to be not — Altman arrived just in time for All-Star guard Kyrie Irving’s trade demand.
Rather than make Irving finish out the two years remaining on his contract, the Cavs saw the impasse as irreparable and not only capitulated to Irving’s wishes, but sent him to Eastern Conference rival Boston Celtics.
That now appears to be a blunder that could end LeBron James’ second stint in Cleveland. Titles are what matters to James, and after Monday night’s 118-108 home loss to the defending champion Golden State Warriors, the gap between the two teams is widening.
Counting the 2017 Finals, the Cavs have lost six of their past seven to the Warriors.
Overall, the Cavs have lost nine of 12, which have left them 7½ games behind the Celtics and just 3½ games out of the eighth seed. Since they won 18 out of 19 in November/December against a weaker schedule, they are 1-6 against teams with a winning record.
Most disturbing in the wake of Irving’s departure, the Cavs are left with a roster that looks like a collection of misfit toys and there might not be time to sort through the jumble. Each injured player who returns to action, first Tristan Thompson and Isaiah Thomas with Derrick Rose and Iman Shumpert still to come, has only added to the mishmash and disrupted the flow.
The issues are so serious that after Monday’s game, multiple prominent players told The Athletic, Cleveland. com and ESPN that the Cavs’ problems might not be fixable.
The fears revealed privately might be a push for the Cavs to take action before the Feb. 8 trade deadline.
But that could create another impasse between the aforementioned players and the Cavs if the team is unwilling to part with the unprotected pick from the Brooklyn Nets it received in the Irving deal. The Cavs see that as a building block if James opts out of his contract and leaves this summer.
At this point, that logic looks flawed. If James departs again, the Cavs will undergo a massive rebuilding that will likely leave them in the same company as the irrelevantfor-decades Browns. With James playing at a Most Valuable Player level at age 33, it is time to stop fixating on the future and go all in for what could be the Cavs’ last championship chase for some time. Only a dreamer could conceive the Cavs getting another franchise-altering player like James or Irving from the Nets pick, although the odds of that might be greater if Griffin were still in charge.
The Cavs have three starters — Thomas, Jae Crowder and J.R. Smith — who are giving them virtually nothing on offense or defense. Five games into his return from a torn labrum in his right hip, Thomas continues to insist that he’s hampered by the fact that the oldest team in the league rarely practices, even though the Cavs practiced Sunday and Wednesday.
While Thomas was firing up a game-high 21 shots Monday, Kyle Korver got only three, lost in the rotation glut that coach Tyronn Lue has yet to sort out. The Cavs looked too old and too slow to give the Warriors a run in a best-of-seven series and the chances of getting that opportunity seem to be dwindling with the roster in its present state.
Before the game, Lue said he’s confident the Cavs will be the best team in the East “because we’ve got the best player in the world” in James. But Lue is banking on the fact that Thomas will return to his All-Star form.
In that regard, Warriors coach Steve Kerr said it took Kevin Durant two to three months to acclimate to the team’s style when he signed as a free agent before last season and Durant wasn’t coming off an injury.
Durant said the way the Cavs are playing this early in Thomas’ return is not a true indicator of where they’ll be in April.
“He hasn’t played in seven months, so you gotta give him some time,” Durant said. “I know exactly how that feels, especially being thrown in in the middle of the season and starting and playing 30-plus minutes.
Everyone knows it’s going to take a while to get into a comfortable groove here. It’s a new system, so I don’t think this game was any indication of what’s going to happen with this team down the line. They’ll be much better than they are right now and we all know that.”
But much better isn’t likely to be good enough to beat the Warriors, or even to get to the Finals for the fourth consecutive year without answers.