The mistake by the lake. The stink by the drink. The bleary by the Erie. The list goes on. Sources tell me that Cleveland has had some trouble with its professional sports teams recently. And what we experienced last night in a tiny New England town called Boston was no different, and to some people, no surprise at all.
Don't count me among those people. I was honestly surprised, and taken aback, and any number of synonyms for the concept. Here's a team that's been the best team in the league all season, has shown that it has a second and third gear to just shut teams down and obliterate their hopes, with the best basketball player on the planet, and they went down unceremoniously to a bunch of 35 year olds and a point guard with enormous hands. I honestly was surprised. I thought the Cavs would make a game of it, come out stomping on faces and send it back to a game seven in Cleveland, swiping back all the momentum and chest-beating bravado of the series. Instead, what transpired was one of the most indescribable tail-between-the-legs efforts you're ever likely to see in the playoffs.
By all accounts, the Cavs played hard in the first half. They came out with some purpose, had some good plays going, got some baskets, and Mo Williams finally was able to turn off the cruise control (damn Toyota) and play some crunch-time basketball. Then came halftime. Something happened at halftime. Either Don Vito Corleone strolled into the locker room and made the Cavs an offer they couldn't refuse, or Lebron was attacked by a rabid fan and stabbed in the elbow, or Knicks president Donnie Walsh sent them "complimentary" bottles of Gatorade laced with Valium. Their fire disappeared. Antawn Jamison channeled Antoine Walker and missed every shot he took. Shaq channeled George Burns. Mo Williams channeled Mo Williams, circa last week. The Celtics played well, well enough to win, but in my opinion, not well enough to beat the best team in the league. At times they appeared as if they couldn't believe how easy they were having it. All they had to do was stand still and Lebron would fumble the ball. Or relax on Williams as he missed another jumper. They'd get the ball on offense and sit on it, certainly thinking to themselves, "Whatever funk Cleveland is in won't last long, so we've got to milk this now."
Only the funk basically lasted the whole game. Only for a short moment did the Cavs show life, when Lebron hit back to back three pointers to cut the deficit to 4. But even thinking back on that, it was almost dumb luck, I mean he hit two jump shots, he could have missed two jump shots, from a gameplan standpoint it was nothing extraordinary. The Cavs just seemed to bail. ("When life hands you lemons, I say, f*** the lemons, and bail.") And for once I don't mean "wake up in the morning and see they lost and claim they bailed", I mean, if you watched the game, you literally thought to yourself, "What the HELL are they doing out there?" I'm leaning more towards the Donnie Walsh "gift" mentioned above--it seemed like Lebron was fighting off a bad haze. He could snap out of it for only moments at a time, but then would get caught right back up in it, like Jordan during tv timeouts of The Flu Game, only this was during gameplay. And forget the other players on the Cavs. They might as well have not existed, with the exception of Anderson Varejao, who, to his credit, constantly works hard and is one of the only players on court who seemed to recognize that his season was about to end. As an example, here's a photo of Lebron (courtesy of ESPN.com) toward the end of the fourth quarter:
"Oh, gosh, huh, well, I guess we're going to lose." Now, maybe I'm not fair, and maybe I'm being irrationally angry towards him, but you know what? If there's ONE thing people appreciate from athletes--the athletes who make millions of dollars a year to play a game that we can watch--it's giving your all. And I might really be treating him unfairly, since, after all, you can look at his box score and say, "He put up 27-19-10, how is that not giving his all?" Well, I watched. And yeah, he played hard for a good portion of the game, which is more than I can say for most of his teammates, and he even put on a superhuman display of rebounding to start the fourth quarter (check out this portion of the play-by-play:
But as soon as that flurry ended, it turned into a great display of tall men looking around and shrugging their shoulders. They gave up. And it angered me. Like, really, really angered me. I'm not a big Cavs fan or anything--I like them, I want to see them succeed (probably partially because they have yet to), and they're my de facto Eastern Conference rooting interest while the Suns and Thunder toil with the Lakers out West. But I feel kind of betrayed having rooted for them to win that series. They didn't seem to really want to do it themselves, so why should I have wanted it for them? Professional athletes talk a lot of big game about "team" and "championships" and "that's the only thing that matters", but the last five minutes of last night's game were those minutes that you want to shield little kids from forever. (You don't want to have to look into their eyes and answer the question, "But why are they giving up?") It left me with a sick feeling, like maybe there was something bigger at work, like maybe these guys are such good showmen that they've tricked everyone into thinking that they cared. The announcers even pin-pointed that fact during the game, with about 4 minutes left. They said, "The Cavs have been doing the dancing/laughing/joking act all season long, that's who they are, that's how they present themselves as teammates, why don't you keep that going now? If you're going to do that when you're winning, then you have to do that when you're losing as well." And the point was not that they should be dancing or laughing as their season came to an end, but that they should be losing together. With about 3 minutes left, the Cavaliers seemingly decided by way of osmosis that they were done, they stopped attacking on offense, they stopped boxing out, the poked aimlessly at balls trying to get easy steals but no longer moved their feet on defense. I've seen the act hundreds of times playing pickup ball--a team gets down in a hole, maybe they get down to game point, and unless the deficit is only a couple of points, they just sort of resign themselves to their fate. Well, to me, that's okay in the regular season, or in pickup ball, or the All-Star game, whatever. Don't risk injury for a 10% chance of winning. It's not worth it, in the economic sense. But it was an elimination game. If they sat down and rolled over, they'd have a 0% chance of forcing a Game 7, a 0% chance of advancing, a 0% chance of winning a championship--the thing they all claimed they wanted so badly. Why not go into full panic mode? Why not try to swarm on defense, go for steals, trap players, attack the basket, play at 200 MPH? At least that way you have a CHANCE of winning. You might end up exhausting yourselves or giving up easy buckets, but at that stage in time, it doesn't make a difference, you'd lose anyway. At the very least you'd make the Celtics work for it, and besides Ray Allen, their shooters were struggling from the free throw line.
I just didn't understand.
This was the same Lebron who scored the last 25 points for his team against Detroit in that Game 5 masterpiece? This was the same Lebron who exploded on the Bulls in the first round? The same Lebron who seemed to outduel Kobe in every regular season matchup in his career? Didn't seem like it. As much as you can say he was being childish after last year's season ending storm-off-the-court incident versus Orlando, looking back, I'd almost prefer that to this year. He was PISSED OFF. And rightly so. He put up triple doubles all over that series, a one-man wrecking crew, but still the Magic had answers at every other position. He left his mark as a man who was not satisfied. This year, he hugged all the opponents, barely acknowledged his teammates, and walked off as if it was February. If you're a die-hard Cavs fan, you know what? You'd probably take last year's reaction 10 times out of 10. And that highlights a big point of the athlete-fan relationship. The fan is almost never satisfied. Sometimes that's patently unfair. But sometimes, every once in a while, it's deserved.
There's so much speculation about Lebron's future and where is he going and how much will his movement impact the league. Well, that's all well and good when it gets here, but for now, all we have is the results of what happened. It's hard to imagine, given the media attention showered on this loss, that there are still two more rounds of playoffs to go. I admire the four teams who got there, they've really played their asses off and earned it (even though the Magic advanced by beating a Hawks team that was even LESS inspired than the Cavs were last night), but some of the games I've seen this postseason make me think that there should be some changes in the way the league is organized.
Pundits have argued back and forth about how teams should be penalized for tanking during the regular season to get higher draft picks, but to me, there's a pretty simple solution--players should be paid per win. Not entirely, of course, but there should definitely be some incentive there. Agents and players would never agree to this of course, and after all, what is basketball without the players? But you can't tell me you wouldn't see a better brand of basketball if players' paychecks depended on it.
Imagine this: the league and its teams only have a certain amount of money, M, to go around. No matter what happens, they're not going to mysteriously misplace or obtain a giant sum of money to be applied to players' salaries. It's pretty much known well before the season starts. So why not take 40% of that money and stash it in a separate pool. Players salaries are fixed at a minimum of 60% of what their face value is. You sign a contract for $10 million a year? Good, you're going to get $6 million of it, even if your team loses every game. Then, you take the remaining 40% of the salaries, divide each team's stash into 82 games, and then before each game, the teams ante it into a winner's purse. Let's say the Cavs have a yearly salary of $70 million and the Bulls $60 million. 40% x $70M = $28M / 82 G = $341,400 per game. The Bulls, likewise, have 40% x $60M = $24M / 82 G = $292,700 per game to offer. So when they play each other, $634,100 is at stake between them. If Bulls win, their players win back their team's contribution, divided in a proportional manner according to the players' contracts (i.e. if Derrick Rose is making 10% of his team's salary, he'll get 10% of the winnings), and the money earned from the Cavaliers would be split in two--half of the money is distributed according to that same proportional breakdown, and the other half is split evenly between the players who suited up. That way, if you're injured, you can still make back the money you "deserve" if your team wins, but there's an additional bonus awarded to players who suit up, albeit only half of the opponent's stake. And you can apply the same strategy to the postseason. That way, players won't have to lie anymore and tell us it's all about the championships. They'll really mean it. 16 more possible game checks? Yes, please. They'll play for that money, for sure.
It would be nice if it didn't have to come down to that, but from what I've seen this year, the players seem to have grown disinterested with the carrots that are already in front of them. They need new carrots, different carrots. They need the carrots they already have to be taken away. You can show a dog a toy, and he may or may not be interested. But if you take a toy from a dog's mouth, tell me he isn't going to fight you for it. The potential upside to this? Maybe games between the Wizards and Nets become heated affairs. Maybe players play out of their minds, maybe more fans come into see that, maybe the league generates some more buzz, some more revenue, and isn't that what everyone wants--revenue?
Who knows. I'm no expert, I know relatively little about the workings of the league's business, and I'm positive that this type of scenario would never play itself out in any major sport. But it's fun to speculate.
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