2008-09 NBA Team Preview – Cleveland Cavaliers

2008 Record: 45-37
Division Finish: 2nd – Central
2008 Playoffs: Lost, 4-3, to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Semifinals

Head Coach: Mike Brown
Season: Going into fourth season
Record At Cleveland: 245-101

Offseason Acquisitions:
Signed Ronald Dupree, F, 1.0 ppg, 2.0 rpg, from Seattle
Signed Tarence Kinsey, G, 3.6 ppg., 1.1 rpg from Memphis
Signed center Lorenzen Wright, F-C, 1.0 ppg, 2.8 rpg. from Sacramento
Traded Damon Jones to Milwaukee & Joe Smith to Oklahoma City Thunder. Got guard Maurice Williams, G, 10.2 ppg, 6.1 apg. from Milwaukee

Offseason Transactions:
Resigned guard Daniel Gibson
Resigned guard Delonte West

Offseason Losses:
Damon Jones, G, 6.5 ppg, 1.1 rpg., Free agent
Devin Brown, G, 7.5 ppg., 3.4 rpg., Signed with New Orleans Hornets
Dwayne Jones, C, 1.0 ppg., 2.0 ppg., Signed with Orlando Magic
Detemtris Nichols, F, 1.1 ppg, 0.4 rpg., Claimed off waivers by Chicago Bulls

Rookies:
JJ Hickson, F, 6-9, NC State, 14.8 ppg., 8.5 rpg.
Darnell Jackson, F, 6-8, Kansas, 11.2 ppg., 6.7 rpg.
Sasha Kaun, C, 6-11, Kansas, 7.1 ppg., 3.9 rpg.
Signed Jawad Williams, F

The Skinny:
If the Cleveland Cavaliers want to make that next step from a good team in the East to a great team in the NBA that has a chance to win a championship, they need look no farther than one of their Central Conference foes. The Chicago Bulls wrote the playbook on how to win with a superstar and Cleveland general manager Danny Ferry needs to not only read it, but take the necessary steps.

For my money, the Cavs have the best player in the league in LeBron James. He might not go out and score 50 points in a night like Kobe Bryant and may not play as much defense as Bryant, but he’s more consistent than Bryant. He can beat you in so many ways that I think he’s more versatile than Bryant. He also rebounds a lot better than Bryant and being around the basket creates scoring opportunities with second chance points.

Another reason that makes James a better player in my opinion is that he’s trying to get everyone involved and make them a better team. James’ idol was Jordan and he knows if he wants to be in the same company some day that he has to start winning championships. Jordan was a great player but his status was elevated even higher once he started winning titles. Karl Malone may be one of the 50 greatest players in the league’s history but he’ll start to fade into the background because he was never on a championship team.

James can score just about any time he wants. It’s not a matter of if he could; it’s a matter of does he want to. I’m sure a lot of team would like for him to just to try to score at will. Detroit will let James get 45 points, but hold the rest of the team to 30 and the Pistons will come out on top almost every time.

But LeBron is smarter than that. He knows he has to get them involved because there are going to be nights when he can’t score at will and has to rely on his teammates. He also knows that he needs them because he already gets all of the attention off the court and if that spreads to the floor they won’t be as likely to play as hard. Look at the Lakers for the last few years up until this year. It was the Kobe Show and he wasn’t doing anything to make friends so no one wanted to play hard or play with him and they lost. He became more of a leader, wasn’t a ball hog, shut his mouth some and they went to the Finals.

So the Cavaliers knew they needed help last year when the acquired the services of Ben Wallace in a big midseason trade. Along with Wallace, Cleveland picked up guard Delonte West from Seattle and guard Wally Szcerbiak from Chicago. In the process they got rid of a lot of dead weight as the traded sent six players packing, topped by Drew Gooden, Larry Hughes, Donyell Marshall and Shannon Brown.

Hughes and Marshall made sense. Both are getting long in the tooth and Marshall isn’t a great team player. Brown isn’t living up to the hype at Michigan State and he’s not doing it in the pros either. The one that surprised me is Gooden. He’s only been in the league six years and was averaging 11.3 ppg. and 8.3 ppg., but you have to give up something in those trades and they felt like Gooden was ready to go.

For his size, 6-foot-9, Wallace has been one of the best rebounders in the league over the last half a decade. However, he is getting a bit old. With a dozen NBA seasons under his belt he is getting close to hanging it up. Szcerbiak is a solid role player who can help a ball team win if he can stay healthy.

I like the edition of West. He’s a younger version of Hughes who averaged 10.3 ppg., 4.5 assists per game and 3.7 rpg. They also picked up Maurice Williams in trade during the offseason. He averaged 10.2 ppg and 6.1 apg for the Milwaukee Bucks so it will be interesting to see what happens in the battle between he and Hughes.

Most of the Cavs offseason moves besides getting Williams weren’t that spectacular. They drafted a pair of pretty solid forwards in JJ Hickson from NC State and Kansas’ Darnell Jackson. With Wallace as a mentor they don’t have to jump right into the fold and be expected to contribute, though they may.

Prediction:
I still think the Cavaliers are a year or two from putting together a championships team though when you’ve got a player the caliber of James anything is possible. If this team sticks together for 2-to-3 more years and they can keep some key guys in place then they may be a contender in 2009-10 or the following year. They have to resign James, but that’s a whole other blog.

They’ve got a great center in Zydrunas Ilgauskas, who averaged 14.1 ppg and led the squad at 9.4 rpg., and he’s locked up until the 2010-11 season. As I stated before I’m also a fan of West and Williams. One of them may have to play the point and the other the off guard because that’s where they’ve got a hole.

The Cavs have a pair of holes in their off guard and power forward. I don’t know if Wallace can hold up through the whole season, though being on the floor with Ilgauskas  and James may take some of the focus away from him and let him be productive like Dennis Rodman was with the Lakers. Hickson and Jackson could be good down the road but it’s hard to tell.

Since I predicted Detroit to win the Central and the NBA title the best I can give Cleveland is a second-place showing in the Central. I’ll give them the upset of Boston in the Eastern Conference semifinals, but they’ll lose to Detroit in six.

As the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, the Detroit Pistons were a member team of the old National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America (BAA) before joining the NBA in 1949 and becoming the Detroit Pistons in 1957.

Today, the three-time champion Detroit Pistons play their home games at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Their head coach is the newly-hired Michael Curry, and their general manager is Joe Dumars, who played on the back-to-back title winning Pistons of 1989 and 1990.

Early Years in Detroit

When the Pistons first moved to Detroit in 1957, they immediately established themselves as a tough team to beat. They made the playoffs in each of their firsts six seasons in Detroit, though they didn’t get past the division finals.

The 1960s and 1970s were far from kind to the Pistons, who boasted some big names of the era but could not translate that into winning seasons. Between 1963 and 1973, the team only appeared in the playoffs once, despite having high-profile players like Bob Lanier, Dave DeBusschere, Dave Bing, and Jimmy Walker.

Despite a few playoff berths in the mid-1970s, the Detroit Pistons did not begin to establish themselves as an NBA contender until they drafted an Indiana point guard named Isiah Thomas in 1981.

Isiah and the Bad Boys

The Pistons continued to build after drafting Thomas. They acquired guard Vinnie Johnson and center Bill Laimbeer in 1982. This paid quick dividends for the team, as they returned to the playoffs in the 1983-84 season. They lost in the first round to the New York Knicks, but things were beginning to look up for Detroit.

The Pistons picked little-known shooting guard Joe Dumars in 1985, and they picked up forward Rick Mahorn in a trade that same year. Thomas, Dumars, Mahorn, Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman would form the core of the team that would earn the nickname “Bad Boys.”

The Detroit teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s had a rough, physical style of play that earned them the nickname. Rodman, Mahorn, and Laimbeer were well-known for their ability to get under the skin of opposing players. The team, under the leadership of head coach Chuck Daly, had a defense-first mentality that cast them as the polar opposite of flashier teams like the L.A. Lakers.

Championships

In the 1987-88 season, after amassing 54 regular season wins, the Pistons established themselves as the class of the Eastern Conference, beating the Washington Bullets, the Chicago Bulls and the Boston Celtics on their way to their first NBA Finals appearance since 1956 (when they were the Fort Wayne Pistons). They battled hard with the Western champion Lakers, but they eventually fell in seven games.

The following season, the Pistons won 63 games and returned to the NBA Finals bent on revenge against the Lakers. They got their revenge, sweeping the Lakers in four games.

The following year, the defending champion Pistons won 59 games and returned to the NBA Finals, this time against the Portland Trail Blazers. The opponent was different, but the result was the same. Detroit beat the Blazers in five games, making the “Bad Boys” back-to-back champions.

By the 1993-94 season, most of the core players had either retired or been traded, and the Bad Boy era came to an end.

Joe Dumars, the last holdover from the championship era, retired in 1999 and was named Detroit’s general manager in 2000. From the bottom up, he built a team that would eventually consist of Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, Ben Wallace, and Rasheed Wallace, among others. With these players, and the guiding hand of head coach Larry Brown (hired in 2003), Dumars constructed a team that would give him a third championship ring, and the team defeated the Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant-led Lakers in the 2004 Finals. That Finals victory had at least an indirect impact on the fate of the Lakers, who, until then, were considered the first NBA dynasty of the new millennium.

2007-08 Season

With much of the championship core still in place (Ben Wallace left for the Chicago Bulls in 2006), the 2007-08 Pistons racked up 59 regular season wins and looked to be a favorite to win the East. They beat the Philadelphia 76ers in six games and the Orlando Magic in five games before falling to the eventual champion Boston Celtics in six games.

At the end of the 2008 season, head coach Flip Saunders left the team and was replaced by assistant coach Michael Curry.

2008-09 Outlook

Rasheed Wallace, Billups, Prince and Hamilton return, though they are a year older. Young players like Jason Maxiell and Rodney Stuckey will be expected to take on additional minutes and relieve some of the pressure off the older players. If they can do that, the Pistons will be a contender to win the East.

Greatest Players

Dave Bing, Chauncey Billups, Joe Dumars, Richard “Rip” Hamilton, Grant Hill, Dennis Rodman, Isiah Thomas