Tag: elgin baylor

Maybe Cavs Need Fit More Than Talent.

By the end of this month, it is very likely the roster of the Cleveland Cavaliers will look quite different. The Cavs have the third pick in the draft, and rumors persist of a trade coming involving leading scorer Collin Sexton.

While it may be absurd to many people for a team with one of the worst records in the league over the last three years to move their best player, you have to remember that basketball is not a sport where the best talent wins all the time, there has to be a good fit.

You can’t take players’ statistics and add them together when talking about possibilities. For example, a team made up of Stephen Curry, Bradley Beal, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Jayson Tatum, the leading scorers at their respective positions, would not average 146 points per game, which is the accumulation of their scoring averages in 2020-21.

To go really old school, the 1967-68 Los Angeles Lakers won 52 games and went to the NBA Finals behind two of the great players of the era, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. They also had Archie Clark, who averaged 19.9 points that year. Clark was a prolific scorer, with a career scoring mark of 16 points per contest, with a high season of 25 PPG.

That off-season, the Lakers, feeling they needed something to push them over the top, combat Boston and Bill Russell, and win their first title in LA, traded Clark, center Darrell Imhoff and Jerry Chambers to Philadelphia for Wilt Chamberlain, who we still believe is the greatest center in NBA history.

Surely, the combination of three all time greats would lead to a championship.

The addition of Wilt the Stilt got the Lakers back to The Finals, where they again lost to Boston in 1968-69. Chamberlain missed all but 12 regular seasons the following season, but was back for the playoffs, where again LA lost in seven games to the New York Knicks.

After a loss in the conference finals to Milwaukee in ’70-’71 (Baylor was injured and retired early the following season), the Lakers inserted Jim McMillan in the starting lineup for Baylor and the team became unbeatable, going on a 33 games winning streak (still the all-time record), and won a then league record 69 games and won the title.

McMillan was a good player, not a great one (18.8 points, 6.5 rebounds in the championship season), but was a perfect fit for that team.

The Cavaliers are a losing team, winning 19, 19, and 22 games the last three seasons, and although Sexton was the leading scorer the past two years, he wasn’t the Cavs’ leader in win shares in any of the years he has been on the team. The first two years it was Larry Nance, and last season it was Jarrett Allen.

Based on this, we can see why the Cleveland front office is hesitant to give Sexton a contract extension, and may feel moving him now to bring in some pieces who might fit better with guys like Darius Garland, Allen, and whoever the wine and gold take with the third overall pick.

Although it is difficult to believe, it isn’t always about the talent in basketball, it’s about how that talent fits and the combination of players can play off of each other.

Look at the transformation Chris Paul made with Phoenix. His presence changed the dynamic of the roster.

That happens a lot in the NBA, and could be the answer in Cleveland. We understand that thinking.

Why Can’t Some NBA Players Finish the Season?

The NBA season is no doubt a marathon.  It starts with training camps in October and if a team is lucky enough to get to The Finals, it doesn’t end until the end of June.

The eight months of traveling, and unlike baseball, the trips are just in and out of a city.  They don’t allow players to stay in a city for three or four days, depending on the length of a series.

However, like they usually do, the star players are making the last few weeks of the season a joke, in that many of them take the last few games off.  Just the other day, LeBron James said he was going to take the balance of the regular season off, to order to rest up for the playoffs.

James took time off here at the end of the season too.  Apparently, he will be joined on the bench by Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, his teammates on the Heat.

We aren’t picking on them, because you will see a great many all-star caliper players missing games throughout the last week of the campaign.

And if the playoffs started tomorrow, they would be able to go.  They aren’t injured, they are resting.

David Stern, the dictator commissioner, in a high-profile move (the kind he loves) fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for telling Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker to go home at the end of a road trip, therefore missing a game against the Heat.

Why no action here, Mr. Stern?

The NBA season used to be much shorter, and players didn’t miss the last week of action.

In 1966-67, the season opened on October 15th and the regular season ended March 19th, cutting at least two weeks off the span in which the season is currently played in.  However, of the first team All-NBA team that season, which included Rick Barry, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, and Jerry West, only West missed games toward the end of the year, and he played the last game, scoring one point.

The current players don’t want to have reduced minutes, because it will hurt their statistics, and they certainly don’t want that.  Guess West didn’t care about his numbers.

In 1976-77, the season started about a week ahead of where it starts now and ends about a week sooner as well.  Four of the league’s first team all-NBA players (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, David Thompson, Paul Westphal, and Elvin Hayes) played more than 80 regular season games.  The other, Pete Maravich played till the end, but missed time in March with an injury.

Ten years later, 1986-87, the league was on its current timetable of starting around Halloween and ending around April 20th.  The first team stars that year were Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kevin McHale, and Hakeem Olajuwon.  McHale did miss some April games, but returned to play the last couple of contests.  Jordan and Johnson each played over 80 games, with Jordan playing them all.

In 1996-97, the least amount of games played by the best players, who were Jordan, Olajuwon, Tim Hardaway, Karl Malone, and Grant Hill, were the 78 played by Olajuwon.  Even Hill, whose career has been destroyed by injuries, played in 80 contests that season.

So, when did this sitting out the last couple of weeks start?  It’s a slap in the face to the ticket buyers around the league that the stars aren’t playing the late season games.

Why doesn’t Stern do anything about it.  The first round of the playoffs has a tremendous amount of days off built in, so players certainly are able to rest during this time.

It doesn’t help that most of the playoff spots have been decided in each conference for several weeks.

If what Spurs’ coach Gregg Popovich did early in the year bothers the commish, so should this.  If the players aren’t going to play, then the regular season should be shortened.

JK