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 “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.

Here’s a Marketing Plan for Tribe: WIN!

A little over a week ago, the Cleveland Indians sent an email to various fans asking for input on a new seating plan. They are studying taking out several rows of seating in the lower bowl between first base and third base and replacing them with tables to create a patio type area.

They were just feeling people out on doing something like this, nothing has been decided as far as we know.

Last year, there were rumors the Indians were looking at putting a hotel beyond the right field stands removing a portion of the upper deck.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that typifies the organization in recent years. That is a defeatist attitude.

They seem to be searching for various ways to draw people to Progressive Field, kind of reminiscent of the Cavaliers organization after the Brad Daugherty-Mark Price-Larry Nance teams.

At that time, the Cavs changed uniforms several times, even going to the popular color at the time, a black jersey. They brought in a supposed superstar in Shawn Kemp. They tried all sorts of marketing gimmicks.

It didn’t work, because the only gimmick that draws fans to games in Cleveland, Ohio isn’t a gimmick at all. It’s called winning!

Instead of taking out seats, the Tribe front office should be looking at accumulating talent so they can win and draw fans to a beautiful ballpark that doesn’t need a facelift. They are taking the easy way out instead of listening to the true baseball fans on the North Coast.

Here’s hoping new manager Terry Francona slaps some sense into the people running the Indians.

Recently, Indians’ president Mark Shapiro was interviewed by Fox Sports Ohio’s Patrick McManamon, where he talked about the number of wins the teams’ research shows a free agent worth $9 million will bring. The numbers show one victory is gained, which supports the decision the Indians have made not to sign free agents.

Obviously, it’s not as simple as that, and you need to look no further than Alex Rodriguez to see what spending huge amounts of money on aging players can do for you. For the Yankees, it’s a bothersome contract, for a team like the Indians, it would be suicide.

Still, the question that comes from here is all of this statistical analysis is nice, but what if it is wrong? And here’s a stat for Shapiro…nine losing seasons in 11 years. Your model is not working.

After this season’s disaster, it was thought that perhaps the Indians’ front office gained some humility, but maybe getting a skipper that has won two World Series to take the job in Cleveland has empowered the Tribe.

They’ve talked about how they have spent more days in first place than any other team in the Central Division the last two years like that’s an important statistic. Instead, it just brings more ridicule for bringing up something so inane.

The reason the Indians are losing season ticket holders is the hardcore baseball fans in this city no longer have confidence in the front office and ownership.

That’s what Dolan, Shapiro, and Antonetti need to repair, not come up with plans that have little to do with baseball. Those things are nice, but without the fanatics, attendance is going to continue to decrease.

That should be the basis for any surveys. Just one question: If we can build a team that can make a sustained playoff push (three or four straight years), will you buy tickets?

The answer would be a resounding YES!