#CavsRank Villains: 20-16

20. Jim Paxson

(By Cory Hughey) Some of the most flagrant terrorists to the American ideal have been internal, from Benedict Arnold to Timothy McVeigh. Some of the biggest villains to the Cavaliers chances at winning a title ate away at the franchise like a termite, from the inside out. You could make the case that Paxson was a victim of circumstance, and I don’t think he intentionally damaged the team (except for tanking for LeBron of course), but he was certainly a stooge. The Cavaliers failed miserably under Paxson’s time in the rusty throne to the tune of a 185-307 record.

1999-2000 32-50
2000-2001 30-52
2001-2002 29-53
2002-2003 17-65
2003-2004 35-47
2004-2005 42-40

If you’d like to check out his entire transaction report card, you can find it here. Here’s the CliffsNotes version of his lowlights:

June 28, 2000-Selected Jamal Crawford (1st round, 8th pick) in the 2000 NBA Draft. In retrospect, you could make a case that Crawford was the best player to come out of the putrid 2000 NBA Draft. Michael Redd’s highs were higher, but Crawford is the only rotation player from that draft currently in the league (No, Mike Miller isn’t a rotation player).

June 28, 2000-Traded Jamal Crawford AND CASH to the Chicago Bulls for Chris Mihm. Mihm only played in the NBA for 8 seasons because he was 7-feet tall, and the worst player on your freshman basketball team probably would have at least slugged a Gatorade in an NBA locker room eventually if he grew to be that tall. FUN FACT: The draft pick that ended up becoming Chris Mihm was the last part of the Wizards 1994 trade for Chris Webber along with Tom Gugliotta, the 1996 pick that became Todd Fuller, and the 1998 pick that became…Vince Carter.

January 2, 2001-Traded Brevin Knight to the Atlanta Hawks for Jim Jackson’s corpse rental, Anthony Johnson, and Larry Robinson. Perhaps there was some beef between Andre Miller and Knight over playing time, but Knight was an ideal backup point guard for a decade

June 27, 2001-Selected DeSagana Diop (8th overall), Brendan Haywood (21st overall). Joe Johnson went two selections after Diop. It’s a layup to make fun of Johnson’s contract now, but he was a top 25 player in the league for years. Also Richard Jefferson went five picks later.

a Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Jim Paxson answers questions about a trade with the Philadelphia 76ers, Friday, Aug. 3, 2001, in Cleveland. The Cavaliers sent forwards Matt Harpring and Cedric Henderson and center Robert Traylor to the 76ers for Tyrone Hill and forward Jumaine Jones (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)

June 27, 2001-Traded Brendan Haywood for Michael Doleac. Haywood was only in America overpaid by Dallas, then amnestied, but he was a solid rim protector for a decade.

June 26, 2002-Selected DaJuan Wagner (6th overall) Perhaps if Wagner didn’t colitis, he could have been a worthwhile selection. Either way, Nene, Amar’e Stoudemire, and all went directly after Wagner.

July 30, 2002-Traded Andre Miller and Bryant Smith to the Los Angeles Clippers for Harold Jamison and Darius Miles. There actually could have been a talented young core around LeBron during his first tour of duty with the Cavs.

June 24, 2004-Selected Luke Jackson (10th overall) Andre Iguodola went one spot before Jackson. Considering that Paxson began giving away draft picks as if they were Watch Tower pamphlets, send some away to move up would have been worthwhile.

The first and last Jiri Welsh pic in the history of CtB.

February 24, 2005-Traded a 2007 first round pick to the Boston Celtics for Jiri Welsch. Aaron Brooks, Arron Affalo, Tiago Splitter, Carl Landry, Josh McRoberts and Marc fricken Gasol were drafted after the pick. In a related story Paxson was fired two months later.

Paxson was one of the most influential members of the Cavs organization. His complete ineptitude of roster management put the Cavs in position to land LeBron James. I thoroughly believe that if James wasn’t drafted to the Cavs that he never would have played for franchise, other than perhaps a late career season or two.

Paxson’s failure to build around James surely contributed to LeBron leaving in 2010. The NBA is littered with retread coaches and general managers. Paxson was never giving the keys to a franchise again. That says something.

19. Scottie Pippen

(By Nate Smith) Scottie’s career numbers against the Cavs are solid: 15.2 points, 6.4 rebounds, and 5.4 assists in the regular season to go along with a 53 TS%. But it was in the playoffs where Pippen did the most damage. From 1988-1994, the Bulls bounced the Cavs five times. Pippen played significant minutes even in his rookie year, but from his second year on, Pippen was the ace point forward that helped Jordan destroy the Cavs. We all remember “the shot,” but Jordan would have never gotten that opportunity without Pippen’s excellent play in the series. Pippen had 29 points in games one and six, and absolutely destroyed the Cavs on the glass to the tune of 11.2 boards per game.

In 1994 when Jordan was playing baseball for the Birmingham Barons, Pippen led the Bulls to a first round sweep of the Cavs, scoring 76 points in three games. Almost every play made was dynamic and effortless (the rebound, spin, and finish at the 6:00 mark below is absolutely filthy). The Cavs were never the same after that series, and ended up trading Mark Price two seasons later.

Part of what made Pippen so infuriating was the way he made life difficult for Price in the playoffs, as Mary Schmitt Boyer of the Plain Dealer noted in 2010.

Where he really made an impact was when he and Jordan double-teamed Mark Price on the perimeter. Price, at 6-feet, could not see over the two. Coach Phil Jackson saved this tactic for the playoffs, especially Game 3 of the 1992 conference finals, which keyed an easy Bulls victory after the Cavs’ 107-81 rout of the Bulls in Chicago in Game 2.

Pippen has continued to be an annoyance in his post-playing days. After LeBron winked at Scottie in game five of this year’s Bulls series, Pippen came back during the finals to troll LeBron with this statement.

I was LeBron James before LeBron James… It’s not even close… They want to compare him to the greatest, whether it be Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson, but he’s more closer to myself… It’s natural for folks to say that, but if you look at how he plays the game and how I played the game, you’ll see more similarities with us.

And you know what? He may be right. Chuck Daly called Scottie the second best player on the Dream Team, the ultimate “fill-in-the-blanks-guy.” No player in NBA history may have sublimated his game more for the good of his team than Pippen. And no player may have given up more money to do so. Pippen was signed to a six year rookie contract. And he took an extension just to get more cash, before the Bulls signed Tony Kukoc and paid him more than the perpetually underpaid Pippen.

Part of this frustration resulted in the most damning moment of Pippen’s career, Game 3 against the Knicks in 1994, when Pippen refused to leave the bench in the final 1.8 seconds because the last shot was called for Tony Kukoc. Kukoc ended up hitting the game winner (though he didn’t call glass). It was the most inexplicably selfish moment of Pippen’s career, a career marked by consistent unselfishness. It begs the question, would LeBron James ever have sulked and sat on the bench? I doubt it, but if LeBron didn’t like the play, he’d have just changed it, even if the coach was Phil Jackson. That, in a nutshell, illustrates LeBron’s higher rank in the basketball pantheon.

18. Bill Laimbeer:

(By Robert Attenweiler) Originally drafted by the Cavaliers as a third round pick (65th overall) out of Notre Dame, Laimbeer was the whining, hacking spiritual center (and literal center, as well) of the “Bad Boys” era of Detroit Pistons basketball. While the back-to-back NBA Champion Pistons teams of 1988-89 and 1989-90 are often depicted as the final hurdle that a young Michael Jordan had to leap on his sprint toward NBA immortality, their time on top also coincided with some of the best Cavs teams of the pre-LeBron era. The Pistons were like a dark, mirror image of the Lenny Wilkens coached Cavs, the tough, bruising Bizarro squad of Laimbeer, Dennis Rodman and Rick Mahorn to the finesse-oriented team game of Brad Daugherty, Mark Price and Larry Nance. The Pistons man-handled their opponents, employing tactics like “the Jordan Rules” to physically intimidate and wear down the other teams star players. The Cavs, meanwhile, were viewed (fairly or not) as the “Nice Guys” to the Pistons “Bad Boys.”

And no player more fully embodied the Bad Boy spirit of basketball vitriol than Laimbeer. By 1989, Laimbeer wasn’t known for his high level of play — in the mid-1980s, he was an all-star four times in five seasons — or his durability — he’d played in 685 before he was suspended for a particularly heated on-court brawl with Daugherty (see below). He was known as an irritant.

Or as Clifton Brown wrote in a 1989 NY Times article:

[Laimbeer] has been fined twice this season for fighting and has also served a one-game suspension. Though he has been involved in countless shoving matches and near-fights in his nine-year career, Laimbeer always stopped short of punching someone, even when someone punched him. But that changed on Jan. 27 in his fight with Daugherty, when both players traded wild swings and were fortunate to escape injury.

17. The Miami Heat

(Nate Smith) One of the things made the Heat so hate-able was that their fans didn’t deserve them. During the LeBron years, Heat fans showed up late, left early, and generally spent more time “Being at the game” than watching basketball. Many a time we tuned in to watch a game at halftime, only to see the lower bowl empty till about five minutes left in the third quarter. Miami has always been one of the worst sports cities in America, and when they got their own NBA super team, many a Clevelander screamed “Why, God, why?” More infuriating was the sense of entitlement and inevitability of the Heat’s championships. The Heat Welcome Party video says it all.

http://twitter.com/CBSSports/status/497101542202544128/photo/1

And to this day, the Heat, their fans, and their media continue to be insufferable, seemingly unappreciative of the four years of beautiful basketball they got to watch. All of this embodied by the likes of Dan Lebatard who was actually suspended by ESPN for trolling via Billboard. This year, LeBatard literally agreed to eat fecal matter if the Cavs won a championship, and held a “Miami Warriors” victory parade when the Cavs lost. Were we ever that bitter and petty? Don’t answer that question.

(Robert Attenweiler) I wonder if there ever have been two teams whose fates have been as interwoven as the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Miami Heat from 2010 to the present. Now, a lot of that interweaving involves a certain player leaving Cleveland for Miami, only to return to the shores of Lake Erie in the summer of 2014.

When LeBron James and Chris Bosh decided to join Dwyane Wade in the summer of 2010, the Heat immediately became the poster team for the (re)new(ed) era of Big Threes and the target of the ire of Cavs fans, as well as fans of other small market teams, other small market team owners, and any former players who viewed James teaming up with two other all-stars as making his ability to win games somehow less difficult as theirs had been.

It was Cavs owner Dan Gilbert who, during the lockout of 2011, led the small market’s charge to impose more stringent luxury tax penalties in an attempt to dissuade those free spending big market teams from building their own version of Miami’s super team. Heat owner Micky Arison, of course, was one of Gilbert’s fiercest opponents in that battle.

Now, Gilbert is now literally paying the price for winning that fight.

Even after James returned to Cleveland, there seemed to be a bit of a hangover from the “college years” he spent in South Beach. James went 0-2 in games against his former ‘mates in Miami and had a proposed reunion with Wade caught on camera following a Cavs loss to the Heat on Christmas Day.

https://youtu.be/9CqRfg79nxM

All this, and the Heat look like they could be even more formidable in 2014-15. They pulled off one of last season’s better trade deadline deals, getting point guard Goran Dragic. Then they got one of the draft night’s biggest steals when Justise Winslow fell to them at 10. They re-upped Dragic and Wade this off-season and added vets Amar’e Stoudemire and Gerald Green to go along with one of last season’s break-out stories in Hassan Whiteside. Health will continue to be an issue for the Heat going forward, but they are poised to continue to be in the #CavsVillains conversation for the foreseeable future.

16. DeShawn Stevenson

SLUG: SP/WIZ25 DATE: 4/24/08 CREDIT: Preston Keres / TWP LOCATION: Washington, DC. CAPTION: Wizards vs. Cleveland : Game 3 playoffs. Here, DeShawn Stevenson celebrates after hitting a 3-pointer over LeBron James. StaffPhoto imported to Merlin on Fri Apr 25 09:21:01 2008

(By Cory Hughey) One of my favorite aspects of Lost and Game of Thrones is that characters go back and forth between being baby faces and heels. Just when you accept that a character is on one side of the fence, they surprise you and flip the script. During LeBron’s first tenure with the Cavs, Stevenson was a fire breathing heel for the Cavs faithful. Waving a “flaming” hand in front of his face every time he hit a three, fronting, and basically being so freaking obnoxious that it got him voted to No. 16 on this list. During the 2008 playoffs, DeShawn trolled that, that LeBron was “overrated.” LeBron’s retort was that responding to Stevenson would be like “Jay-Z responding to Soulja Boy. The beef eventually led to the Jay Z diss track “Blow the Whistle.”

After LeBron went to South Beach and the Heatles became the most hated heel stable the NBA had ever seen, Stevenson turned face. I openly rooted for him during the 2011 Finals, and I’m gonna wing it, I wasn’t alone on that. After the Mavs improbable comeback series victory over Miami, Stevenson’s final retort was donning the awesome shirt pictured above. Ironically, with his Mavs playing days over, Stevenson publically lobbied the Heat to sign him in the summer of ’13. I guess the need for a paycheck trumped pride.