well if the conferences were equal then cleveland would make the conference finals because 2 of the top 4 would be in the west and 2 in the east. practically everyone has a pretender right now due to the unexpected ascent of gsw. when cleveland built it's team, no one saw 67 and 73 wins coming. cleveland has a perfectly serviceable title contender by normal historical standards. while there might be negatives from letting lebron run everything, mortgaging the future isn't one of them. you don't bring back lebron at the end of his prime and decide to build the right way for the next few years. you go for it. and so far that strategy has gotten them 2 finals appearances that could have easily been finals wins if not for gsw's historical greatness.
I don;'t know. I think that narrative is more fiction than reality. Was Kobe in his prime a better raw scorer? Sure. So was AI, and various other players. But whether or not that impacted winning to the extent you say? I'm not so sure. The non-superstar teammate years for Kobe point to no, as do the various times when Kobe might have scored in volume, but with crazy poor efficiency. Meanwhile, Lebron has had his share of crazy moments as well, even scoring. If I'm nitpicking one thing about Lebron, relative to others like Kobe, etc... it's that he just doesn't seem to elevate the games of other "stars". Wade, Bosh, Kyrie, Love... non of them seem to play better with Lebron. Lebron does wonders for "role" players. Tristan Thomson is better, JR Smith is better, Delladova is better, Mike Miller is better, Mario Chalmers is better... whether better statistically or just better as a productive winning NBAer. I can't pinpoint why exactly, though.
thompson is worth his contract. based on his win shares this season, he was slightly underpaid and if he keeps it up, which he should given that he is 24, he will be more underpaid in the years to come. considering all of the leverage thompson had given that cleveland pretty much had to pay him or lose a big contributor from a finals run for nothing, it's not a bad contract.
It depends how you set up the playoff bracket. If you do a 1-16 format, then in the second round, the Cavs would have to play a top 4 team in the West, and I would argue, a healthy Clipper team would take out the Cavs in a 7 game series. OKC were not pretenders. I would argue that the Spurs would likely have taken the Warriors to 6. I don't see this CLE team beating any of the top 3 in the West (arguably top 4). What? Of course they mortgaged the future. What was the downside to keeping Wiggins and seeing if he would be able to play alongside Lebron? Instead, you trade him and get Love, whom you could have signed in the offseason regardless? Then, you outbid yourself to give Tristan Thompson a 5 year deal when no one else was going to give that kind of money? Same with Shump. I'm not saying that you don't go for it if you're in Cleveland's shoes. But, the way they went about it was literally the worst possible outcome.
That team lost by 30 at home to Golden State. They were supposed to match up better with a new style and Frye taking Mozgov's place in the rotation. It turns out, though, that no style works against the Warriors if you can't play great defense. And the Cavs don't have the personnel to play great defense. They could run out an okay defensive team with James, Dellavedova, Shumpert, Thompson and Mozgov but that's basically the team the Warriors ran off the court last year once they figured out the "death lineup."
The Cavaliers are a terrible organization and the fans are terrible. I hope they never win anything. They don't deserve it and they don't deserve LeBron. LeBron should go back to South Beach where Riley isn't going to give in to every LeBron demand to sign his best friends to undeserved contracts.
Seriously I laughed my ass off when Tyronn Lue said he wanted to play faster against the Warriors. This team needs to play to its strengths and not to the Warriors strengths.
well that difference is mostly because harrison barnes is still on his rookie contract and kyrie just came off his rookie deal. and they got curry on a ridiculous deal when people thought his ankles would be a problem. otherwise, thompson and green are either on or basically on max contracts, bogut is as well and barely even played in last year's finals, and iguodala is paid max/near max money to come off the bench. they're paying 93M even with curry on a lucky deal and before they have to actually pay barnes.
sure, he would shoot. but he wasn't a given to actually make the shots. and he could have games where he shot from the beginning and wasn't on and wouldn't stop shooting and shot his team out of it.
wade played exceptionally well next to lebron when wade was healthy. their first 3 years together wade had PER's of 25, 26, and 24, even with 2nd option (or option 1b) touches. bosh didn't get worse, he was just a 3rd option and 3rd options only get so many shots. he still was a key PnR player, spread the floor, and played good D. neither wade nor bosh have gotten better since lebron left. they haven't fallen apart, but they've basically maintained or slightly decreased their play in these last 2 seasons. kyrie's best season was last year. obviously some of that is just getting older, but he didn't get worse. and he's had a great playoffs this year until gsw destroyed him. love would be the only one who has struggled, and even then it's more of the bosh problem that there are only so many touches for the 3rd option, which both guys struggled to adjust to but which is also pretty much necessary to adjust to considering the first 2 options were so good. love's stats are mostly down because his usage is down.
All this is indicative of the difference in management between the two teams. CLE would have had an effective young player on a rookie contract if they didn't pander to Lebron. Instead, they traded away a valuable piece for nothing but an overrated PF that they could have signed regardless in the summer. Finals MVP Igoudala is making $11 mil a year - that's not much more than Shumpert, and a lot less than Thompson. At signs indicate that Warriors likely won't pay Barnes what he wants, and that would be astute on part of the management. Compare this to CLE, who would throw max dollars at whoever Lebron deems is worthy.
Regardless of how bad his percentage was for the game, with the game on the line he almost always shot them back in the game. We can almost always depend on Kobe to put together 5-7 baskets in a row. Lebron can't do that
the downside is that he's a rookie and you could spend 2 years of lebron's prime trying to figure out if wiggins can play with lebron and then find out that he can't. and the actuality is that wiggins hasn't torn it up. obviously love hasn't been a perfect fit, but wiggins is coming off a 16.5 PER, 0.07 WS/48 season and hasn't cracked 31% from 3's in either season. he's considered a good defender and yet his defensive rating and DBPM have been terrible both years, which happens to rookies. so you spend 2 years with a rookie who isn't playing defense yet and who can't spread the floor. sure he might one day be a great player, but as you've agreed, there's a time component here. but that would be the next offseason. so almost certainly wasting a year with wiggins (because he's a 19-year-old rookie) and then just hoping love picks you in free agency. it's hard to turn down certainty when you know you have a window that lasts as long as lebron's prime.
i guess i was thinking of his previous contract being really close to the max. even then a $12M/yr contract isn't really a bargain for someone you can afford to have come off the bench. i assume you mean thompson? i'm not sure i buy shumpert as someone lebron had to have given that jr smith would seemingly be a bigger lebron guy than shumpert and smith didn't get any sort of good deal (at $5M he's underpaid). thompson is worth his contract and even if he had been slightly overpaid, he was largely irreplaceable for the cavs b/c they had no other capspace to sign or assets to trade for someone of thompson's caliber who also fit the team really well. thompson basically proved himself to maybe be the 2nd most important player on a finals team that took gsw to 6 games. you can't lose that guy. on the other hand, barnes is probably the 6th most important guy on his team and his team has largely won even with him struggling. he is more replaceable. and he almost certainly is not going to be worth his contract given his role on the warriors so it certainly makes more sense for them to not sign him than for cleveland to not sign thompson.
The point isn't that Wiggins was somehow guaranteed to become Pippen to Lebron's MJ. Even if he wasn't, he was still a very valuable piece with which you can use to build your championship squad. The WORST that can happen is you hold onto him for a year, then get value back for him in the summer, while potentially losing out on a year with Love. I don't understand the argument about the uncertainty over Love picking CLE during free agency... you do realize that either way, Love would have to pick CLE, right? I guess you can say that having a year with Lebron would make him want to sign, but that's iffy at best. What if he doesn't get along with Lebron and hates him? Too many unpredictable factors here... And from another perspective, it's just wholly myopic to say that you MUST win within a very strict time frame. Don't get me wrong - I agree that there IS a time frame, but I don't think it's that black and white. I understand that Lebron is on the downswing, and his talent is dissipating by the year, but rushing your team and making hasty moves are the WORST thing you can do. Dirk won his ring at age 32, and his team was constructed with one smart move at a time until everything and everyone fell into place. I can totally see a scenario where they win a chip where Lebron is an older but still effective version of himself surrounded by a collection of young and old talent that FIT.
Really? Are you trolling? With all that Igoudala has done this year and last, you're going to say that $11.7 mil for him isn't a bargain? Hell, by the second to last year of Shumpert's contract, he is due $10.3 mil. Igoudala is easily a standard deviation better than Shumpert. I'm sorry but he's basically a Bismack Biyombo without the shot blocking capabilities. I mean, this is a 6'9 PF that can't score, can't finish, can't protect the rim, can't run a P and R. He's one dimensional, and just happens to fit in with the Cavs. No one else was going to offer him big money, and CLE overpaid. The fact that his agent is the same as Lebron makes it all the worse.
It's hard to judge by stats. if i'm looking at stats, wade and bosh both had fairly meaningfully lower PERs than before they teamed up with Lebron. But as you correctly note, 3 key guys sharing the duties is bound to due some of that. Kyrie's statistically been basically the same player. Stats aside, just using the eye test, there's never been an easy mesh with Lebron and his star teammates. Obviously he has those 2 rings in Miami, so it's still worked at times. But nowhere near what you'd expect. And it isn't just Bosh or Love being 3rd fiddle. There's fit issues. And for a guy who is such a willing passer and willing teammate, it doesn't seem to click. I don't know why it is, but that's the way it seems.
