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Pop sowing his oats..
Cavaliers’ rise to ranks of elite has S.A. roots
Jeff McDonald
If the Cleveland Cavaliers go on to win their first NBA championship this summer, June 14, 2007 will go down as a seminal date in franchise history.
That was the night the Spurs finished off a thorough four-game Finals whipping of the Cavs, winning their fourth le and putting a sudden end to LeBron James' Cinderella run.
It was the closest that the Cleveland franchise had ever been to an NBA championship. And yet, as the Cavaliers' top executives left Quicken Loans Arena that night, a le still felt as far away as ever.
“We came out of that with a sense of disappointment at the way things finished,” said Lance Blanks, Cleveland's assistant general manager. “We realized we had to tweak some things and make some changes. We looked at it as a starting point.”
The Cavaliers will visit the AT&T Center tonight for just the second time since their Finals flop in '07. They arrive as a better class of championship contender than they have ever been.
Cleveland is 44-12, the best record in the Eastern Conference. Though the general consensus seems to have defending champion Boston as the team to beat in the East, nobody will be surprised if the Cavaliers dethrone the Celtics — especially if the Cavs hold on to home-court advantage.
Cleveland's rise to the ranks of the uber-elite has roots in San Antonio.
General manager Danny Ferry ended his playing career with the Spurs from 2000 to 2003, then served in the front office as their director of basketball operations. Blanks was once the Spurs' director of scouting. Closer to the court, coach Mike Brown and assistant Hank Egan spent time on the Spurs' bench with Gregg Popovich.
“We took so many things from San Antonio,” Blanks said. “They are first-class in the way they approach the process, the way they put a team together.”
Ferry hasn't followed the Spurs' approach to team-building in lockstep — the Cavaliers, for example, own the third-highest payroll in the league and will be luxury tax payers again this season. But a bit of the Spurs' blueprint is apparent in Cleveland, especially in the Cavs' methodical acquisition of role players to flank their star, James.
After the Cavs flamed out in the 2007 Finals, the team's brain trust sat down with one directive in mind: Get LeBron some help.
In the past two years, Ferry has swung trades for a trio of starters — Ben Wallace, Delonte West and, last summer's find, point guard Mo Williams. He has negotiated team-friendly contracts, most notably two summers ago, when he finessed Anderson Varejao's holdout into a deal favorable to the Cavs.
Then, there are the trades Ferry did not make. The Cavs flirted with Phoenix over Shaquille O'Neal at this year's trading deadline, but opted to remain pat in the name of team chemistry.
It is that feel for team construction that leads Popovich to say of Ferry, “We hated to see him go.”
“He's jumped in with both feet and made great business decisions, great people decisions,” Popovich said. “He knows what kind of chemistry wins. He's put together a heck of a group.”
Last summer, Ferry produced a game-changer, landing Williams from Milwaukee in a three-team trade.
Williams has blossomed into an All-Star, averaging 17.6 points per game and taking some scoring pressure off James' shoulders. Most analysts point to his arrival as the day the Cleveland got serious about a championship.
Ask Spurs defensive ace Bruce Bowen what makes the Cavs special now, and he doesn't hesitate.
“Point guard,” Bowen said. “They played almost three years without a point guard. They had one, but Eric Snow wasn't quite what they needed, because of the way people would load up on LeBron.”
What the Cavs needed was a guard who could score. Williams has provided that. And West, recently returned from a wrist injury, has proven to be a steady third perimeter option.
“Now you load up on LeBron, and he'll give it to either guy, and they shoot the 3-ball well,” Bowen said. “What can you do?”
It was a helpless feeling the Cavaliers knew all too well in June 2007, as the Spurs paraded past them en route to le No. 4.
“It was a good gauge playing against San Antonio on that kind of stage with so much at stake,” Blanks said. “We put our heads down and tried to assess the team, and decide what we could do to get us to a higher level.”
New running mates
LeBron James' supporting cast has changed in the last two years. Here are the players who surrounded the small forward in 2007 and those who do so today:
Point guard
2007: Larry Hughes
2009: Mo Williams
Shooting guard
2007: Sasha Pavlovic
2009: Delonte West
Power forward
2007: Drew Gooden
2009: Ben Wallace*
Center
2007: Zydrunas Ilgauskas
2009: Ilgauskas
Bench
2007: F Anderson Varejao, G Eric Snow, G Daniel Gibson, F Donyell Marshall
2009: Varejao, Gibson, F Wally Szczerbiak
* Wallace broke his right leg in Houston on Thursday
Pop sowing his oats..
I thought it was fibula, they to lazy to look it up, and just put leg?
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