#CavsRank Villians: 7-6, the Gecko and the ‘Roid Monster

Villains come in all shapes and sizes. They’re not always pretty. Sometimes they take what they want by force. And sometimes, they’re incipiently slick and persuasive enough to corrupt even the most loyal into giving in to their sense of greed with the promise of untold riches and rings. However, they’re all ruthless in their own ways, be it trash talking and rebounds, delivering hard elbows and collecting scalps, or having a forked tongue slipperier than any amount of brylcreem worked into a slick-back power ‘do from the mid-80s. And sometimes they’re devoid of guile: merely some three-point slinging ‘roided up Turks (in both senses of the word) playing out of their minds.

7. Pat Riley

(By Cory Hughey) Riley certainly is a villain of his time. The only reason people look fondly upon the 80s, is because it was so coke vomit terrible. It’s hilarious in retrospect that any of it actually happened. Everything needed to be magnified. Forest green just wouldnt’t do! We needed blinding neon green-on everything! Cars needed to be bigger. Hair needed to be bigger. Women needed blazers with shoulder pads. Gallagher was packing arenas, and Bill Hicks and Marc Maron were just trying to get by. The people were just a reflection of the time, and they were too busy funding Pablo Escobar’s Hacienda Napoles to notice how bad it really was. If I had a child, and had to describe to them what the 80s were like, I would show them this gibberish heavy, music-less Billy Squire “Rock Me Tonight” video. That’s what the 80s were like kiddo.

Perhaps no person in NBA history has had better timing than Riley. He ascended to the drivers seat of the Showtime Lakers in 1981, after a Magic Johnson power play that got Paul Westhead fired. The Lakers up-tempo offense goes against everything Riley has shown since, and it was the brainchild of Jack McKinney, Westhead’s predecessor who was basically fired because he had massive head trauma from a bicycling accident. Riley’s next stop was to a championship ready Knicks squad, where he failed to win a title. In 1995, Riley resigned from the Knicks post via fax to become the team president and head coach of the Miami Heat. Tampering charges were filed, since Riley still had another year on his contract, and a first round pick and $1 million was sent to the Knicks in exchange.

Riley’s Heat and former Knicks team mucked up NBA badly with their good squad defenses. Their “send four guys to one side of the court and isolate on the other side” offenses were designed to blatantly exploit illegal defense rules. The NBA had to enact wholesale rule changes to get rid of that painfully unpleasant style of play.  (Thank Pat and Jeff Van Gundy for the current illegal defense rules and the crackdown on hand-checking).

Riley’s arrival wasn’t the only time the Heat and Riles were hit with tampering allegations. Just two years after Miami’s 2006 championship season, the Heat bottomed out after a series of terrible trades to the tune of a league worst 15-67 record. At the time, it appear that Miami was haphazardly rebuilding around Wade. They weren’t burning two years of Wade’s prime, they were preparing for the free agent bonanza of 2010. In 2009 Riley arranged a meeting with Michael Jordan and LeBron, and during it he stressed to James that modern players should pay more homage to Jordan. After the Cavs game against the heat, James proclaimed that he would no longer wear No. 23 out of respect to Jordan. After that, Riley knew that he had LeBron’s ear.

For all of the accolades Riley has gotten, he went 18 seasons between his last Lakers title and the highly controversial 2006 Miami Heat title that he poached from Stan Van Gundy. Today, he sits a top the throne of the Miami Mafia. Things are still sunny in Miami, as Hassan Whiteside emerged out of no where, and Justice Winslow surprisingly fell into Riley’s lap with the 10th pick in the draft.

Is Riley a genius, or just really, really lucky? Cols could have coached the Showtime Lakers to three titles. The team was loaded like Kieffer Sutherland at an open bar wedding. One of the primary reasons Riley was given the job, with no previous head coaching experience, was that he just let Magic run the show. If Riley built his resume in Milwaukee or Indiana, I could see the genius label being accurate.

I’m not gonna lie. I hate Pat Riley. I’m might not spit in his face if we met, but I’d definitely throw a low blow his way that isn’t publishable. I hate everything about him. I hate his greasy slick back hairdo. I hate his smug arrogance. I hate that he stole LeBron away. In Riley’s defense, the Cavs opened the door to that union through years of mismanagement. All it took was beaches and the bling of a few championship rings on a desk to get LeBron to leave, and at the time it was more than the Cavs had on the table. The thing that I hate the most about Pat Riley is that he’s universally thought of as the best in the business, when in reality he’s a championship carpetbagger.

 6. The Magic’s 4-Headed 3-Point Yolo Roid Monster

(By Tom Pestak) I’ll be honest, I signed up for this and now I want nothing to do with it.  The 2009 Cavs/Magic ECF represents the depths of my fan misery.  It represents the one time I crossed over the “it’s just a game” threshold without turning back.  At the height of NBA knowledge, I was completely shell-shocked, unable to process the buzzsaw that the continued to hum on my last ever glowing CRT TV.

The only solace I ever recall from this series was a post-game beat from Brian Windhorst.  I remember thinking “I’m not crazy – this is ridiculous – they are playing out of their minds.”

I watched the Magic about 15 times during the regular season and probably examined about 75 percent of their box scores. I’ve seen most of their playoff games. They have never played like this. Usually you can look at the Magic’s 3-point shooting and make a fair guess as to whether they won or not. If you saw 17-of-38 and 50 percent shooting overall, you asked did they win by 15 or 27? I can sit here and go over the Cavs strategy for two hours but if Rafer Alston and Mickael Pietrus go 11-of-23 on 3-pointers, Dwight Howard shoots 75 percent from the foul line and Rashard Lewis makes game-saving 3-pointers, what can be done? I don’t know. You can rip Mo Williams all you want and, wow, is that guy going to have a rough offseason, but the Cavs scored 100 points in regulation. That has to be enough to win.

RIGHT?!  The Magic were the No. 1 defense in the league during the season, and the Cavs were putting up points.  It was a given that Dwight Howard was going to have his way with Big Z and or Andy.  The Cavs record was 66-16 and they led the NBA in point differential.  Cleveland could live with a mismatch here or there, but how were the Magic going to stop LeBron???

The Magic didn’t stop LeBron.  Not even a little bit.  It wasn’t for a lack of trying, mind you, they just didn’t get too worked up about the best player in the game at the absolute apex of his talents erupting for 39/8/8 on 49% shooting against the best defense in the NBA.  (Forget what you’ve been told – 2008-2009 LeBron was a force of nature that we may not see again for a very long time).

The “4-Headed 3-Point Yolo Roid Monster” alludes to a few things.  First is of course Rashard Lewis’ failed PED test that forced him to miss 10 games in November of 2009 (you know, the games that don’t matter).  Given the timing of the announcement (August 2009) and the timeframe in which the NBA tested for drugs (Through June 30th) it’s highly likely that Lewis was, uh, elevating his testosterone during his prolific series against the Cavs.  (And just in case you think he was alone in this, Turkoglu was suspended for 20 games in 2013 for taking “methenolone, an anabolic steroid.” I’m betting the 2009 Magic had a lot of bacne.) The “yolo” part is in reference to the blasé manner in which the entire Magic team hoisted shots against the NBA’s best team.  There are open shots, there are contested rhythm shots, there are spot-up shots, and then there are the shots the Magic continued to make:  contested, out-of-rhythm, sometimes in transition with little in the way of squaring up or feet setting.  Hell, Rashard Lewis was draining JAB-STEP 3s!  That’s a mid-range move, not something you do to break your rhythm and throw off your balance when you’re 23 feet from the basket.  No shot was too awkward for Lewis.  Check out this REVERSE PIVOT trey in the closing moments of Game 4.

Lewis killed the Cavs in the 4th quarter of game 1, scoring 12 of his 22 including the game winning 3, which, again, was an out-of-rhythm jab-step 3.

This mindset infected the entire team.  As fans we were used to Hedo Turkoglu using his size to hoist bad shots over smaller defenders.  But Mickael Pietrus?  A career 35% spot-up 3-point shooter that was by far and away most comfortable from the corners…that guy led the Magic with 17 3s over six games and made almost half his attempts.  And these were off the dribble, in transition, all over the place – not those Bruce Bowen-esque root-planting in-the-corner threes we’d come to expect.  Pietrus never had a series like that in his life, hasn’t since, and is already out of the league.  His swagger throughout the series was part Manny being Manny, part Nick Young (only his shots were going in).

He promptly turned back into your slightly above average pumpkin during the NBA finals, sporting a 57% True-Shooting Percentage as opposed to the 69% he posted against the Cavs.  He attempted 30% fewer 3s in the five-game championship series against the Lakers than he made in the six games against the Cavs.

And then there was Rafer, “Skip to my Lou” Alston.  Most of us had breathed a sigh of relief when Jameer Nelson, arguably the Magic’s second best player, was out for the series with an injured shoulder.

Alston was a decent backup at best.  He started in just 11 playoff games prior to the 2008-2009 season where started all 23 games for the Magic.  He never sniffed the playoffs again after that season.  But in Game 4, the pivotal game that could have swung the series back in the Cavs’ favor, Alston scored 26 points on 17 shots, included a banked-in 3 as LeBron James closed out on him.  It was his season high.  In over 700 career NBA games (reg season and playoffs) Rafer Alston scored 26 or more points a grand total of 7 times.

The entire 2009 Magic Team was one of the greatest villains in Cavalier history.  Do you realize that Dan Gilbert spent $40 million dollars on a washed up Shaq simply because at 300+ pounds he was one of about three guys in the league that could bang with Dwight Howard in single coverage.  $40 million just to guard one guy a certain way on the off chance they should meet again in the postseason (which, of course they didn’t). What a toxic series for Cavs fans…It was heartbreaking, it was dumbfounding, it was infuriating.  The Magic played with house money and straight up punked the Cavs. Here’s Windy again, talking about Mike Brown’s inability to unnerve the Orlando hydra.

He’s adjusting his lineup back and fourth. He changing coverages. He’s taking some risks. He’s playing percentages and working off scouting reports. He’s trying everything he knows how to do. The Magic are perfectly suited to beat him from personnel to strategy to concept. And they’re flying high. If you can detach yourself, it is simply awesome to watch.

Sorry Brian, I was unable to detach.