The Point Four-ward: Then and Now

Four points I’m thinking about the Cleveland Cavaliers…

1.) Okay, confession time. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the 2007 Cleveland Cavaliers. Still. To this day.

In particular, as these playoffs have continued, I’ve found myself increasingly suspicious of the narrative that LeBron James is pulling along his current crop of overmatched Cavalier teammates kicking and screaming on his one-man mission to return to the Finals. Clearly, James has been huge for the Cavaliers. No one is arguing against that. It just seemed like there was a difference between this year’s team and James’s previous Cavaliers squads, particularly the one that made the 2007 Finals — that even if the Cavs were leaning on James more in these playoffs (and your can’t argue that James’s 2015’s playoff usage rate of 36.4% is a substantial uptick from the 29.7% usage he posted in the 2007 playoffs) that his teammates this year were performing better in support of James.

In that way, as James and head coach David Blatt have said, this is very much a team now, in a way that it wasn’t in 2007 when the roster was more built to support the talents of a 22-year old one-man wrecking crew.

2.) Most of the numbers don’t do much to clarify this position. Yes, Kyrie Irving’s 18.7 PPG average in the playoffs is a better “second banana” to James than was Larry Hughes’s 11.3 PPG on 34% shooting. [Note: Hughes actually started the 2007 playoffs very strong, topping James by scoring 27 points in Game 1 against Washington, then following up with 19 points in Game 2. As the playoffs wore on, though, Hughes was slowed by injury (sound eerily familiar?) and from facing increasingly better defenses.]

But, aside from that, most of the other 2007 rotation players are within a point or two per game of their 2015 versions. Then, I noticed a fun stat: the 2015 Cavaliers have 10 players with a True Shooting Percentage over 50%, led by Tristan Thompson’s 61%. In fact, James is the only regular player with a sub-50 True Shooting Percentage at 49.2%. But, you know what? 2007’s True Shooting Percentage isn’t god awful. Led by Daniel Gibson’s 61%, that team still featured five regular players shooting over 50% TS.

Still, I couldn’t shake the idea that this crop of non-LeBron Cavs were playing better than their 2007 versions. They were making more big plays. They were hitting more key shots. They were being more efficient.

Efficiency. You’d think that’s where the difference starts to show. Excluding James’s 24.8 PER, the 2015 Cavs have five players with a PER over the league average of 15 and Irving leads the team with an un-Kyrie-like 17 PER. But the 2007 Cavs (again led by James and his PER of 23.9) had Zydrunas Ilgauskas with a PER of 18 and Daniel Gibson nearly tying Kyrie with a 16.8 PER.

So… dunno. All I know is that watching this Cavaliers team feels different somehow. Different good. Maybe it’s quantifiable good. I’m sure it is, actually… I just thought it would be more easily quantifiably good.

3.) Perhaps my strongest memory of the last Cavs team to take this trip into the undiscovered country, though, is the feeling that we’d be back. Soon. Next Year. Again and again.

But in 2008, Danny Ferry, the architect of Atlanta’s resurgence this season, finally figured a way to wiggle out from under Larry Hughes’s bloated contract (by taking on Ben Wallace’s) only to bring LeBron new teammates with names like West and Szczerbiak without enough time to gel before they ran into the buzzsaw that was the 2008-eventual-champion Celtics. The next year, it took an historic shooting performance by an Orlando Magic team that featured a player who would soon after get busted for testing positive for performance enhancing drugs, the surprisingly brief peak of a player most assumed would be one of the league’s best for the next decade,  and Hedo Turkoglu. Then we all know what happened in 2010.

So, while it’s been five straight trips to the NBA Finals for LeBron James and six overall, it’s just the second one in the history of the Cleveland Cavaliers franchise. Things happen. Turkoglus happen. Every year, there is a different team of destiny — and rarely do we know which team that gets to be until they near the finish line. Maybe it’s Cleveland this year. Maybe it’s Golden State. Both have made solid claims so far.

So, enjoy this ride, Cavaliers fans. There might be more of these. But there might not be. In the coming storm of wins and losses, remember what an insane gift of a ride it has been to be a fan of Cleveland Cavaliers basketball for the last 12 months and continue to enjoy this weird, wonderful team.

4.) Another reason I’m so hung up on 2007? I wrote a dang play about it.

Back in 2011, Scott Henkle and I wrote Our Greatest Year about a young married couple returning to Cleveland to care for an ailing parent… and some historically ailing sports franchises. 2007 was the Cleveland-iest of Cleveland years as each of the Cavs, Indians and Browns achieving some dizzying highs, only to have each season end with an all too familiar thud.

Some of the biggest laughs the play would get is when one of the characters says of LeBron, “He’s the best. And he’s ours. And we, who have a hard time feeling good about anything, are made quite a bit of happy.” Of course, that was in 2011 (and in subsequent performances in 2012) where the sting of The Decision was at its freshest. The “he’s ours” was always meant as a bit of a comment on our own covetous attachment to athletes, but the laughs came from a place of “Boy, you have no idea what’s in store…”

Likewise, we don’t know what’s in store for the Cavs and LeBron this time around. For that very reason, it took me a long time to rediscover my joy of watching LeBron James as a Cavalier this season. Slowly, though, that joy has returned and this playoff run, in particular, has made me quite a bit of happy.

Between the live-action scenes of Our Greatest Year were these motion comics (written and illustrated by Mr. Henkle) and I thought I’d share the first one of the series today, as it’s the most Cavs-centric and best fits my current LeBron state of mind.

Onto the Finals, kids…