Enjoy The Ride Getting There Is Half The Fun!

?COMMENTARY

I was born in Boston Massachusetts on March 8, 1956. One year and five days later April 13, 1957 the Boston Celtics won their first NBA Championship. They made it to the Finals in 1958, but lost to the then ST Louis Hawks. They recaptured the NBA Crown April 9, 1959 one month and one day after my third birthday. They would not lose it again until after I was 11 years old.

Back in those years, there were three absolutes, Death, Taxes, and the Boston Celtics would be the Champion of the NBA. I looked at it as part of my birth right for being lucky enough to being born in Boston. However, Celtics coach Red Auerbach, a true genius of the sport, and the architect, and motivator behind the franchise decided that he had enough of traveling, and retired as coach at the end of the 1966 campaign. He remained as the team’s General Manager and named center Bill Russell as the team’s player coach.

The unthinkable happened the next season, as the Celtics were eliminated by the Philadelphia 76ers who went on to defeat the then San Francisco Warriors for the title in 1967. Although, this was a really strange concept for my then 11 year old brain to handle, the Globe righted itself on it’s axis the next two seasons as the Celtics would win 11 titles in 13 years.

Russell retired after the 1969 season, when I was then 13. Boston would not win again for an eternity until 1974, when I had the world all figured out at 18 years old. A new center emerged Dave Cowens, who along with the man who was literally the prototype of the sixth man John Havelicek made the team fun to watch again. They would win title number 13 in 1976 the Nation’s Bicentennial and my 20th year on the planet.

A man who was born one day less than nine months after me on December 7, 1956 would be the guy who would take the Celtics back to the NBA Valhalla. The Hick from French Lick, Larry Joe Bird along with Robert Parish and Kevin McHale were the nucleus of a team that would win three more NBA Championships. 1981, 1984, and the last one in 1986, now a couple of months after I turned 30, as the NBA Season now carried on through June. The Celtics would have an amazing legacy, winning 16 titles in the NBA’s first 39 years of existence. A ratio that dwarves the New York Yankees 26 world titles in 104 years. The Celtics would lose the NBA Finals to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1987. They have not been back to the Finals since. An entire generation has come of age since Boston last won a NBA Championship, 21 years ago.

I moved to Cleveland,Ohio in 1992, and became a reporter covering the Indians, Browns, and Cavaliers in 1995. I witnessed the removal of a NFL Franchise, the rise and fall of an elite MLB team, and a lot of very sorry basketball. The Cleveland Cavaliers were a mediocre team when I first started to cover them. They soon became far worse! The Cavaliers played a very boring slow down game under than coach Mike Fratello, effective but it would put you to sleep. When Fratello was fired the team would quickly go the NBA bottom.

Cleveland would go through a series of bad drafts, and some pretty poor coaching from 1999, until 2005. Cleveland Cavaliers former owner Gordon Gund put his faith for some reason in Jim Paxson, a guy who was a gutty guard who played in the league most of his career, in Portland and somewhat ironically with the Celtics.

Although as a player, Paxson maximized his skills, he was severely over matched as a NBA General Manager. Yes he could rid the team of big contracts that he inherited from his predecessor Wayne Embry, he also made some terrible blunders in signing free agents and especially in the NBA Draft. Do the names Diop, Langdon, and Wagner ring any bells? They do if you are a Cavaliers fan, some really bad draft picks. Every year was a new plan, this year, we will add veterans, like Chris Gatling and Clarence Weathespoon. The next year we will go athletic, with Darius Miles and Ricky Davis. The team soon became one of the jokes of the league bottoming out in the 17-65 season that somehow led to the Cavaliers getting the breaks in the lottery and getting LeBron James in 2003.

But even then Paxson messed up trying to lock up second round pick Carlos Boozer, for short money after LBJ’s rookie year. Boozer had a club option that the team allowed to lapse allowing him to become an unrestricted free agent, and Boozer went to the team and the coach of his childhood hero Karl Malone. Boozer signed a multi year multi million dollar contract with the Utah Jazz. Boozer was portrayed as the villain in Cleveland but it was Paxson’s mistake pure and simple.

Gund sold the team midway through the next season to a Detroit area businessman Dan Gilbert. Gilbert, fired Cavaliers coach Paul Silas with less than two months left in the season, derailing the Cavaliers playoff hopes for that year that had seemed almost a foregone conclusion at the All-Star break. Paxson was fired as soon as the season was over to nobody in the Cleveland media’s surprise.?

After looking like he was courting then Detroit Pistons coach Larry Brown, Gilbert decided to pull from another elite organization, the San Antonio Spurs. Although it seemed strange at first his first hire was his head coach Mike Brown. Brown was at the time associate head coach for the Indiana Pacers, but he cut his teeth under Greg Popovich with the Spurs. And then Gilbert hired as General Manager former Cavalier and current Spurs front office member Danny Ferry. Gilbert had his management team in place and allowed them to rebuild the team in the Spurs image.

Brown has from the jump in Cleveland emphasised defense, because defense in any sport wins championships. Chicks dig the long ball but defense gets you rings. Ferry and Brown learned at the knee of Popovich, and they learned that what wins in the postseason is defense. Fast break basketball can win you 65-70 games in the regular season, but it is the half court slow down game that will have you play in June.

The Cleveland Cavaliers have made an enormous leap this year, far quicker than really anyone had expected. They have a legitimate top five player in LBJ, but they have not the time or the experience that the Spurs have on their side. But the Spurs will peak either this year or next. The Cavaliers are now one of two teams in the East along with a healthy Washington Wizards team will be the two teams to be reckoned with in the NBA East for the next five years.

Can Cleveland win this year, possible but not probable. But as a commercial used to say for a now defunct bus company enjoy the ride, getting there is half the fun. You never know when you will get back just ask the Boston Celtics.