Why Cleveland Cavaliers Can Gel Quicker Than Expected
In an attempt to juxtapose the Chicago Bulls' long-intact corporate knowledge with his Cleveland Cavaliers' own pursuit of synergy, LeBron James all but warned that it might take awhile for this new roster to put it all together.
"You've got to go through something to create a bond; that means for the worse," James recently told reporters. "We've got to lose ballgames that we think we should've won, we've got to get into an argument every now and then just to test each other out."
It's the kind of realism you'd expect from a four-time MVP who's both won and lost championships.
Nothing is automatic in this league—except perhaps for the fact that bad things do indeed happen to good teams.
"It has to happen. I know it is going to happen," James added. "A lot of guys don't see it, but I see it. That's the only way we're going to be able to grow. You don't define yourself during the good times, you define yourself through the bad times. That's for the players and the coaching staff as well."
James isn't promising six or seven titles after this summer's decision. He's promising trials and tribulations.
But there's reason to believe these Cavaliers will begin discovering their meteoric potential quickly, perhaps before the All-Star break.
The team has gotten off to a 5-1 preseason start, including a 107-98 victory against those formidable Bulls. It's a small and relatively meaningless sample size, but it's only the first of several reasons to believe Cleveland can build strong chemistry in short order.
The most important of those reasons is James himself.
The two-time champion held a players-only meeting prior to the club's first practice, taking the floor to provide each of his teammates with some directives for the season ahead.
"I was looking like, 'Wow.' That's crazy that he broke down every individual thing he wants guys to do," guard Dion Waiters told Yahoo Sports' Marc J. Spears. "He wrote down every player from the guy in training camp who may be here or may not be here...it was unbelievable. It was great."
Important as new head coach David Blatt's leadership will be to this operation, there's no substitute for a player of James' pedigree taking some initiative. This team's on-court identity will have his fingerprints all over it, so it's only fitting the locker room culture does as well.
Several of this club's key contributors (Kevin Love, Kyrie Irving, Dion Waiters, Tristan Thompson) have yet to compete in the playoffs. They'll look to James for guidance, and they won't be disappointed.
Mario Chalmers experienced some of that guidance firsthand as starting point guard for the Miami Heat.
"LeBron is a dominant player, so if he feels like something is not going his way, he's going to say something about it," Chalmers told Northeast Ohio Media Group's Chris Haynes this month. "For Kyrie, he's going to have to adjust to that, and LeBron is going to have to adjust to Kyrie. It's going to be a different factor for Kyrie."
Adjustments: It's a theme that's permeated Cleveland's summer.
The young Irving-Waiters backcourt is ground zero for those adjustments. Can the otherwise ball-dominating guards excel given more time off the ball? Can they remain effective while deferring to James and Love?
"I have to make adjustments," Waiters told media in July. "I like to have the ball, and we have Kyrie, and he likes to have the ball. So I have to find ways to impact the game without having the ball. I'm planning to go watch tape to see what D-Wade did when he played with LeBron. I need to learn how to be effective out there with him."
But for all the early talk of evolving and adapting, the early transition has been seamless—even for Waiters.
"I've been able to play my game," he told reporters this month. "I've been able to attack when I want to, shoot when I want to shoot. So nothing has really changed. We've been gelling well because everybody knows their roles. As long as we take care of what we need to take care of we'll be fine."
It's an encouraging vote of confidence, especially coming from Waiters—a former second option who may now be fourth on the Cavs' totem pole.
While there's no denying all the adjustment talk, there's at least some evidence things are going smoothly.
It helps that no one is harboring any illusions about continuing business as usual.
"I'd be lying to myself and lying to everybody here if I was telling you I didn't have to sacrifice," Love told media this month. "I think it's going to have to be an effort throughout the entire team to do what's best for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
"And we don't know what that is really yet. But I'm going to do what's best for this team to win, because at the end of the day that's what we want, is to win."
With James and Love both clear on their shared endeavor, the Cavaliers may be able to avoid the kind of drama that otherwise might plague such a star-laden core. Love won't touch the ball as often as he did with the Minnesota Timberwolves, but he always knew that would be the case.
There shouldn't be any surprises for these Cavaliers.
Though there are indeed several cooks in Cleveland's kitchen, there's not yet any indication that they won't fit together just fine. James is well beyond chasing statistics, and his career average of 6.9 assists per game speaks volumes about his willingness to share the ball and spotlight alike.
Love tallied 25 points in back-to-back preseason games, and there's a strong chance he remains a prolific scorer throughout the 2014-15 campaign—even if he isn't taking the 18.5 field-goal attempts per game he averaged a season ago.
The Cavaliers need his three-point shooting, and he should inherit plenty of opportunities with guys like James and Irving driving and kicking the ball to the perimeter.
And the X's and O's bottom line is that Blatt favors a motion-heavy offense that should spread the love around. That may mean fewer isolation situations for Irving and Waiters, but it also means the shots they do take are likely to be higher-quality looks, the product of everyone passing up good shots in order to find great ones.
The presence of veteran role players like Anderson Varejao, Shawn Marion and Mike Miller makes that game plan even easier to implement.
These are specialists and glue guys, the kind of weapons who stay in their metaphorical lanes. They round out a rotation that increasingly appears to be on the same page, even if it's a page that's still being written.
James may well be correct about the inevitable adversity, but he knows there will be no shortage of good times—perhaps even sooner than most of us think.
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