A rapid aggregation of elite players leads to great expectations, but recent NBA history suggests no team becomes world beaters in short order. The Cleveland Cavaliers, fortified by LeBron James, are the latest example.
A club widely expected to be the best in the Eastern Conference were thrashed by the Toronto Raptors on the weekend, falling to their fourth successive defeat. Their record became 5-7.
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James returned to his first NBA club in a surprise summer move, joining Kyrie Irving, one of the NBA’s best young guards. The Cavaliers soon added Kevin Love, one of the league’s best power forwards, and Cleveland fans began to dream of a first NBA championship.
The Cavaliers, though, are one of the league’s half-dozen worst defensive teams and get little scoring off the bench; in a defeat at Washington last week the reserves collectively scored nine points.
They also have a scoring cipher at the shooting-forward spot, where Shawn Marion, 36, is scoring barely five points a game.
James, Irving and Love are being pushed hard; they rank among the top five in “minutes played” and James, 30, warned that the pace is not sustainable.
Questions are being directed at the team’s new coach, David Blatt. The Israeli-American had impressive seasons in Europe, as Russia’s national coach and, most recently, with the Maccabi Tel Aviv club, but this is his first job in the NBA.
Blatt has been defiant. “I have never had a losing season,” he said, “and I never will.”
After the home loss to Toronto, James described his team as “fragile”, a word not usually attached to future NBA champions.
“We’re a very fragile team right now,” he said. “We were a fragile team from the beginning. Any little adversity hits us, we just shell up.”
James was part of one of the most successful “super teams”, the Miami Heat, who added James and Chris Bosh in the summer of 2010 and won two championships over the next three seasons. That first season they were 9-8 in their first 17 games and lost in the championship series.
James knows cohesion and confidence require time.
“I’m very optimistic,” he said. “I’m very positive, more positive than I thought I’d be right now. We’ll look at what we did wrong, the things we did right and be ready [for their next game].
“I can’t be negative at all. Once I crack, it trickles down to everybody else, I would never do that to these guys.”
The Cavaliers have 70 games to get things figured out and with James in their line-up are likely to do so. Dominance, though, is another thing.
poberjuerge@thenational.ae
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