Mike Brown took the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first NBA finals, then returned the next season to find two of his top six didn’t want to play for the team.
When they finally seemed to regroup after getting Anderson Varejao and Sasha Pavlovic back, the Cavaliers were shaken up again when they took part in a three-team, 11-player trade at the deadline in February.
All that, and Cleveland still nearly knocked off eventual champion Boston in the second round of the playoffs. With things much more settled this season, no wonder Brown sees huge potential in his current group.
“This is my best team if I take this point in the year and compare it to the previous three years,” he said this week. “I’ve had some pretty good teams here and we’ve done some nice things in the postseason, so that’s yet to be seen yet obviously with this group of guys.”
nutes combined from LeBron James in those two games.
Cleveland didn’t get its 12th win last season until Dec. 20 and started 12-16. Trouble began in the offseason, when Pavlovic and Varejao held out. Varejao didn’t play until December and both missed time with injuries once they did come back.
Just when the Cavs believed things were coming together, the huge deal at the deadline caused more adjustment time and they finished a distant fourth in the Eastern Conference.
This time, Cleveland made its big move in the offseason with the acquisition of point guard Mo Williams from Milwaukee in August. Now a team that for too long needed James to bail it out too often has a more balanced offense, and the Cavs are beating teams by 10.6 points per game, second in the NBA behind the Lakers’ 14.3 margin.
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THE MORNING AFTER: Before what turned out to be his last game with Washington, Eddie Jordan painted a clear picture of hard it is to coach a losing team.
The injury-depleted Wizards fired Jordan on Monday after a 1-10 start, replacing him on an interim basis with Ed Tapscott. They lost their first five games, and after picking up their first victory, dropped another five in a row.
Before that final loss, a 122-117 defeat in New York to a Knicks team that had only seven available players, he talked about how difficult it was to work through such a bad stretch.
it wears on you,” he said. “You go to bed with it, you wake up with it. In the morning, a win or loss is magnified when you wake up. A win feels a little bit better in the morning than it did even that night. And a loss feels just as worse. Yeah, it wears on you.”
Despite his record, Jordan’s firing was somewhat surprising because the Wizards have played all season without injured starters Gilbert Arenas and Brendan Haywood. Jordan said he felt management was behind him, and he had others he could count on for support.
“Your household helps you out a lot,” he said. “Even the players, they text me and say, ‘Coach, we’re behind you a hundred percent. Whatever you want us to do, we’ll do.”
He needed them to win more games.
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TWO-HEADED BEAST: When Terry Porter took over as coach of the Phoenix Suns, he really inherited two teams from Mike D’Antoni.
“We have the Shaq team and the non-Shaq team,” Porter said. “When he’s not around, we try to up the tempo a little bit. We’ll still go into the post to Amare (Stoudemire). We’ll go to Boris (Diaw). But obviously it’s not the same as having Shaq on the floor.”
When Shaquille O’Neal is in the middle of the Suns lineup, Porter calls for a half-court, walk-it-up style of play to accommodate the 16-year veteran.
as run for so long.
The Suns got off to an 11-5 start with a league-high seven road victories already under their belt. But that doesn’t mean all that starting and stopping has been easy to get used to.
“It’s going to be a tougher adjustment for them to slowing down as opposed to speeding up,” Porter said.
Nash agreed. The trigger man for the run-and-gun teams of the last five years, Nash is used putting the pedal to the metal and not letting up for the entire game. Now with the big fella roaming around the paint, he has let off the gas more than ever before in a Suns uniform.
“It is a challenge, and it’s a work in progress,” Nash said.
But he knows it’s work that needs to be done. Despite all the scoring and flash in the Valley of the Sun, Phoenix has always bogged down in the playoffs when the defense tightens up and has been unable to come up with the kind of lockdown defense that wins titles.
“Terry really wanted us to work on our weaknesses, so we’ve spent a lot of time on our defense and our halfcourt offense,” Nash said. “So we lost a lot of what we used to do, and it’s not like a switch that we can turn off and back on. We have to work towards that and find the balance.”
Forward Grant Hill says watching Nash run the slowed-down offense is “like seeing a hummingbird in a plastic bag.”
and feel my way into it and see how I can be effective and help the team and take my share of responsibility in guiding the team to play two ways.”
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LOOKING FOR LOVE: Kevin Love’s first NBA game couldn’t have gone much better.
But after scoring 12 points, grabbing nine rebounds and blocking two shots in the season-opening victory over the Sacramento Kings, things haven’t gone as well for the Minnesota Timberwolves rookie.
Playing sporadic minutes over a six-game stretch that ended with a loss to Phoenix on Wednesday, Love shot just 9-of-39 (23 percent) while averaging 5.8 points a game.
“It’s tough, but you just have to bounce back and keep your head high,” Love said. “This is something I’ve never really dealt with before. So I just need to keep it going, keep rebounding and do other stuff, do the intangible stuff to keep me going and keep the team going.”
After a standout freshman season at UCLA, Love was drafted fifth overall by Memphis. He was traded to the Wolves on draft night along with Mike Miller, Brian Cardinal and Jason Collins for No. 3 pick O.J. Mayo, guard Marko Jaric and forward Antoine Walker.
His low point so far this season may have come against Boston on Nov. 21, when he went 3-for-10 from the field and didn’t know the play called on the first set he entered the game.
back toward the bench.
Later in the game, Love shot a 3-pointer from the top of the key that missed badly.
“What’s wrong with an 18-footer?” Wittman barked.
Still, the coach said these struggles are all part of the process for a player still adjusting to the pro game.
“He’ll be fine,” Wittman said.
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AP Sports Writer Jon Krawczynski in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
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