Giannis’ New Deal Is Good News For NBA.

We love basketball. While we are a fan of the Browns, our favorite sports are baseball and basketball, which makes us a strange sports fan in Cleveland, Ohio.

However, the NBA is getting stale for us, which is painful. It’s a great game played by the best athletes in the world. We were a season ticket holder for the Cavaliers for many years, mostly with mediocre teams, but it was a joy to go to The Coliseum when Brad Daugherty, Mark Price, Larry Nance, and Hot Rod Williams led the Cavs to the playoffs.

They just couldn’t get past Michael Jordan.

The staleness comes from the style of play, which most teams are playing. The three point shot has become over emphasized, and the sport has legislated perimeter defense out of the game, meaning the guards are ruling hoops. It’s difficult to stop a skilled point guard.

And while we understand the analytics in sports and embrace some of it, it can have a negative effect. Teams are being built around taking three point shots, which is actually the most difficult shot in the game. This is based on the theory of making four out of ten from behind the line is equal in points to making six of ten inside the line.

Despite all of this, we did hear some news about the league that made us smile this week.

Giannis Antetokounmpo agreed to a five year super max contract to remain in…Milwaukee, one of the league’s “flyover” cities.

We’ve had a theory for years that smaller NBA markets should look for the best non-North American players for sustained success. Why? Those players don’t grow up hearing about the merits of playing in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Miami, the glamour spots of the NBA.

In Cleveland, we’ve experienced this twice with James leaving for Miami and then Los Angeles. It’s his and every other player’s right to go where he wants when free agency hits, but name a top free agent that signed with a new team that wasn’t located in one of these cities in say, the last 20 years?

We had this theory in our mind since Dirk Nowitzki retired with Dallas, spending 20 years with the franchise. Certainly, Dallas has better weather than a northern city like Milwaukee, Detroit, or Cleveland, and a dynamic owner in Mark Cuban, the Mavericks haven’t been a destination city for the star free agents.

It will be interesting to see in Luca Doncic will also play his entire career in Dallas as well.

Player movement will always be a part of sports, especially in the free agent era. However, of the top 15 active players in Win Shares, only Stephen Curry has played his entire career for one team, and only three others, James Harden, LaMarcus Aldridge and Anthony Davis, have played for two organizations.

And if reports are true, that latter list could consist of just two soon as Harden wants out of Houston.

The player movement is great for the off-season headlines and jersey sales, and the younger fans love the opportunity to see star players on the same team, but it’s tough for longer term supporters who buy season tickets.

Hopefully, Giannis fulfills his contract in Milwaukee and leads the Bucks to some titles. It would be nice to see another smaller market team joined San Antonio, led by another superstar who didn’t grow up in the US in Tim Duncan, be a consistent contender.

Cavs’ Team That Lost By “The Shot” Were No Doubt Good Enough To Win Title

With “The Last Dance” documentary currently airing on ESPN, those Cleveland Cavaliers teams of the late 1980’s have come under scrutiny. After all, it was the 1988-89 version of the team that fell victim to “The Shot”, Michael Jordan’s first playoff success (as a team).

When examining those teams, you have to remember there were really two iterations of that group. The first team featured the three rookies from the class of 1986-87: Brad Daugherty, Ron Harper, Mark Price, and John “Hot Rod” Williams, who was drafted the year before, but sat out due to a legal issue.

That quartet’s rookie season led to a 31-51 record as Harper, Williams, and Daugherty ranked one-two-three in minutes played, and were also the top three scorers. Price was a reserve to John Bagley, playing only 18 minutes.

It was only a two game improvement on the previous season.

The next year saw the Cavs improve to 42-40 and a first round playoff loss to the Bulls in five games (best of five). By the way, Jordan averaged 45.2 points per game in that series.

Larry Nance came to the team that year in a deal for Kevin Johnson, who was drafted in the first round over the summer. Price emerged as a player, making Johnson superfluous.

Think about this. The Cavs guards starting that season were Price, Harper, Johnson, Dell Curry, and Craig Ehlo. Pretty good, eh?

The following season, the Cavaliers were rolling right from the start. They won 24 of their first 29 games, and on February 28th, Cleveland whipped the defending Eastern Conference champion Pistons, 115-99, to raise their record to 42-12, five games ahead of Detroit in the Central Division.

That was also the game that Rick Mahorn elbowed Price in the head at midcourt, a terrible cheap shot. Price missed just two games, but the Cavs went just 15-13 the rest of the season.

Price also missed the first game of the playoffs vs. the Bulls with a hamstring injury, a game the Cavs lost 95-88.

Until Price was elbowed, which was out of frustration from the Cavs beat the Pistons for the third time in as many chances that season, Cleveland, not Detroit and certainly not the Bulls looked like the team coming out of the Eastern Conference.

In fact, as Jordan said during “The Last Dance”, the Cavaliers swept Chicago six games to none in the season series between the two teams.

The Price/Harper backcourt was a joy to watch, they played off each other beautifully, and the front court of Daugherty, Nance, and Williams was long and the latter two were capable of guarding small forwards.

Even though Hot Rod didn’t start, he was in there in the fourth quarter along with Nance.

That’s the group which was capable of winning a title, and we feel they would have had not something else gotten in the way the following season.

That little thing would be the worst trade in NBA history (in our opinion) when Cleveland dealt Harper AND two first round picks to the Clippers for the rights to Danny Ferry and Reggie Williams.

Trading one of your best players is one thing, but including two draft picks which could have been used as assets to improve the team was another. And that Ferry became at best a role player in the NBA was the death knoll.

Ironically, Harper blew out his knee after going to the Clippers.

The Cavs did get to the Eastern Conference finals in 1991-92 with the same group, sans Harper. It was Terrell Brandon’s rookie season. But Nance was 32 years old, and Williams was 29. They lost in six games to the Bulls.

The following season, the Cavaliers went 54-28 and lost in the Eastern semis to, you guessed it, Chicago in a four game sweep. Lenny Wilkens resigned after that season, and by the way, is still not happy about the Harper trade.

Mike Fratello took over and guided an injury plagued team (Daugherty played just 50 games, Nance 33 and neither played in the post-season) to the playoffs where they were swept again by Chicago.

By the next season, Daugherty and Nance were gone, and Price played only 48 games.

If the Harper trade would have never been made, would that group have been able to win an NBA title? We say yes. They were that could, and never really got a second chance.

Cavs “Greatest 8” After 50 Years

The Cleveland Cavaliers will be celebrating their 50th season this season and it is the only franchise in town where we can say we have been there since the beginning.

Before that, NBA basketball in Cleveland was limited to the visits the Cincinnati Royals made each year to our fair city.

In the last year before the Cavs existed, the Royals made four stops at the Cleveland Arena, the final game was played on February 3, 1970, a game won by the Los Angeles Lakers, 124-114.

Jerry West led the way for the Lakers with 38 points, while Tom Van Arsdale had 36 for the Royals.

The Cavaliers entered the league at the same time as the Buffalo Braves and Portland Trailblazers. The league probably thought they were doing the expansion teams a solid by scheduling them for 12 games each against each other.

Obviously, LeBron James is the greatest player ever to wear the Cavs’ uniform, leading the franchise to not only their only championship, but was also the focal point for all five Eastern Conference titles won by the team.

Depending on your point of view, he is one of the three best players to ever play in the NBA.

As soon as he retires, his #23 will hang from the rafters, and we would presume a statue will be erected outside Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse.

Who else would be on the Cavaliers’ top eight players (starters and first subs) in franchise history?

We would start with the only other Cavalier besides James to achieve first team all NBA honors, and that would be Mark Price.

Price is still 5th in all time scoring and 2nd in assists and steals in club history. In addition to his first team All-NBA accolade (1992-93), he was third team three times (’88-’89, ’91-’92, and ’93-’94). He was on the second Cleveland team to lose in the Eastern Conference finals.

Kyrie Irving would be the other guard. It’s really a no brainer to add the four time (with Cleveland) all-star and the guy who made the biggest shot in franchise history. He also was third team All-NBA in 2014-15.

The center was so close we kept two as both Brad Daugherty and Zydrunas Ilgauskas make our “Great 8”.

Both had major injury problems throughout their career (Daugherty’s back issues caused him to retire at 28, while Ilgauskas battled foot problems), but Daugherty was a four time all star and is still 3rd all time in scoring and rebounding, and as a center, is 7th all time in assists.

Ilgauskas is a distant second to James in scoring, and also ranks as the runner-up in games played and rebounding. And he was a starter on the franchise’s first trip to the NBA Finals.

The other forwards, besides James, were mainstays on the early 90’s teams which couldn’t get over the Michael Jordan hurdle: Larry Nance and Hot Rod Williams.

Looking at numbers, you forgot how good Williams was. He ranks 5th in games played, 7th in points, 5th in rebounds, and 2nd in blocked shots in Cavalier history. He was a reserve mostly because Lenny Wilkens loved him as a weapon off the bench, backing up both Daugherty and Nance, and at times playing with them.

Nance is 9th all time in scoring, 8th in boards, 3rd in field goal percentage and blocked shots. He was the final piece in making those teams title contenders. The Cavs were 42-40 the year Nance arrived in a mid-season trade, they won 50 games in three of the next five years.

The last spot on our list goes to franchise icon Austin Carr, whose career was hampered by knee injuries, but was the team’s first star.

Carr was the first overall pick in the draft in 1971, and made the All Star team in his third year with a 21.9 scoring average. He was around 24 PPG the following season when he injured his knee, and became a valuable reserve for the Cavs’ first team that went to the conference finals in 1976.

Those are our Cavs’ “Greatest 8”. The best players Cleveland basketball fans have seen wearing the wine and gold.