“With Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Byron Scott attempting to find the right combination of players and the schedule only getting increasingly more difficult in the coming weeks, what was once a dream is slowly becoming a delusion. On the tails of a reeling and aging Boston Celtics team prior to the All-Star break, the Wine and Gold have now dropped six straight games — a season-long losing streak — with the Denver Nuggets, Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets (a combined winning percentage of 63.4) looking to extend the skid even further.” [Scott Sargent]
“Grant was always going to do what’s best for the Cavaliers’ long-term future. But with his club in freefall and the trade deadline set for March 15, management no longer needs to worry about disappointing players or a segment of the fan base. He doesn’t have to think about conveying the wrong message to young players if a Ramon Sessions or Antawn Jamison gets moved.” [Tom Reed]
Big Z will be working with Tristan Thompson this offseason. I just got visions of TT taking methodical 18-foot set shots off of pick’n'pops.
Dan Diamond discusses the phenomenon of Kyrie Irving PER-ing his age.
And Irving won’t play for the Australian national team in the 2012 Olympics. (He was born in Australia.) He will instead focus on making the 2016 US Olympic team.
It’s awesome to be reminded that Z will have a huge hand in helping mentor Tristan. Hopefully this experiment will work and he’ll have a new, if not extremely consistent, trick in his limited bag. But I can’t help but cringe a little, having experienced the disaster that was JJ Hickson’s infatuation with becoming the next Amare Stoudemire. I have faith in Tristan though. He’s already shown me more than Hickson ever did.
I’m also slightly intrigued by the idea of Z and Semih fostering some kind of friendship. Z is a fellow international player and perhaps he can help Semih utilize his size and really settle in. It’s a stretch but who knows. Maybe the Cavs can find a back up center from the talentless mob of Ryan Hollins, Samardo Samuels and Erden, which is probably what they were hoping to do all along.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7652549/the-nba-rookie-power-rankings-including-kyrie-irving-ricky-rubio-derrick-williams-more
The fact that Tristan isn’t in that is disconcerting. Right now it’s looking like Kenneth Faried, Marshon Brooks, and Kawhi Leonard are the steals of the draft.
Kenneth Faried is a freaking beast. He’s exactly what Tristan should try to emulate – running around just disrupting everything in sight. Sometimes I think TT is a little too stationary – he just settles down low and doesn’t move.
Glad to know that Tristan is going to be getting some help, but I’d prefer that he’d spend some time with Hakeem (whos better than Z and is already ‘proven’ as a teacher of younger players) this of season.
The grantland article in interesting, Faried is essentially playing the way we hope/d TT would play. However, I have to keep in mind that Faried wasn’t in consideration for a lottery pick and that would have been a very lucky and a lot more of a contriversial pick than TT. Also, Faried played 4 years in college compared to TT’s 1 year – so that means Faried has had considerably more ‘training’ and development. So we’ll see what TT looks like in another few years. I hope he turns out to be the player we expected (so far, I think he’s pretty much on course).
K Leonard is the guy that I wanted the Cavs to pick (if not JV). If he develops into the kind of player it looks like he is, choosing TT (whcih was somewhat of a surprise) over Leonard (who would have been less of a surprise considering position played and draft value at the time), the decision to take TT over him can be seen as a ‘miss’ by Grant.
Brooks and others such and Kanter and Williams were either not really considered as viable picks for #4 or already taken. So I don’t see much possible ‘contriversial second guessing’ there. I’m glad that Kyrie continues to get his props and is clearly proving to be the ‘right’ pick overall. There were a lot of question at draft time if we would have been better off with Williams at #1 and either Kemba or Knight as the #4 pick, because of how various team systems and complementry players – we’ll never really know if a Williams/Kemba combo would have been better than Kyrie/TT, but at least there isn’t any question about should we have taken TT as #1.