O'Neal Injury Could Imperil Cavs' Championship Hopes
We don't like to think in terms of championships being decided by injuries but one of the best regular season teams in NBA history--the 1972-73 Boston Celtics team that went 68-14--failed to win the title after Hall of Famer John Havlicek suffered a debilitating shoulder injury. While it is true that there is no guarantee that a healthy Havlicek would have led Boston to the championship that year it is worth noting that Havlicek and the Celtics went on to win two of the next three NBA titles.The Cleveland Cavaliers rolled to the best record in the NBA prior to acquiring two-time All-Star Antawn Jamison for, essentially, nothing (assuming that Zydrunas Ilgauskas returns to Cleveland after 30 days of waiting in NBA-sanctioned purgatory). With Jamison and Ilgauskas in the fold the Cavs have four players who have made the All-Star team multiple times and they boast admirable depth at each position--but that changed when starting center Shaquille O'Neal suffered a thumb injury that will keep him out of action for six to eight weeks.
By the time O'Neal returns, the playoffs will already be well underway and the Cavs will have to scramble to get their rotation set to deal with the likes of 2008 NBA Champion Boston and/or 2009 Eastern Conference Champion Orlando. In my newest CavsNews article, I examine the challenges that Cavs Coach Mike Brown will face in the next two to three months (6/19/15 edit: the link to CavsNews.com no longer works, so I have posted the original article below):
Don’t be
fooled by Cleveland’s 124-93 rout of the hapless
New York Knicks—the Cavs will miss Shaquille O’Neal during his six to eight
week absence as he recovers from thumb surgery and the Cavs very much need to sign
Zydrunas Ilgauskas as soon as they are permitted to do so by league rules.
“Small ball” with J.J. Hickson starting at center looks good against the Knicks
and for short stretches versus certain teams but a month of “small ball”—even
for a team anchored by LeBron James—is not a championship recipe. While it is
true that the upcoming schedule is not particularly daunting—in the next 10
games before Ilgauskas’ likely return to Cleveland, the Cavs play Detroit three
times, Indiana once and New Jersey once—I am not sure that sans O’Neal and
Ilgauskas the Cavs will continue to win at their current league-best .767 pace;
an “extra” loss or two will probably not matter in the race for the top seed in
the East but it could enable the L.A. Lakers to reclaim the best record in the
NBA: thus, even if the Cavs are at full strength come June they may not have
homecourt advantage in a possible NBA Finals matchup with the Lakers. That is
an important factor to consider because the Finals—unlike the preceding playoff
rounds—use a 2-3-2 format that puts a lot of pressure on the team with the
lesser record to sweep the middle three games, which historically has proven to
be a quite daunting task. Admittedly, that is looking very far ahead into a
hypothetical scenario that makes many assumptions about how both the Eastern
and Western Conference playoffs will unfold but it could turn out that the most
significant result of Glen Davis’s bludgeon/tug job on O’Neal’s thumb is the
determination of the location of game one of the 2010 NBA Finals.
Assuming that
O’Neal returns in time for the second or third round of the Eastern Conference
playoffs and Ilgauskas rejoins the team in three weeks, the Cavs will have an
incredibly deep and balanced team for the stretch run, including four players
who have earned multiple All-Star selections (Zydrunas Ilgauskas, LeBron James,
Antawn Jamison and Shaquille O’Neal) plus 2009 All-Star Mo Williams, Sixth Man
of the Year candidate Anderson Varejao, versatile guard Delonte West and a host
of players who have previously started and/or played significant minutes for
playoff teams (Anthony Parker, Daniel Gibson, Jamario Moon and even Leon Powe,
who has looked solid in limited minutes since his recent return from knee
surgery). That is the good news; the bad news is that the NBA playoffs are not
fantasy league basketball: you cannot simply throw the players’ numbers out there
and win.
Newly
acquired power forward Antawn Jamison has fit in very well with Cleveland after
a rough first game with his new team. However, Jamison has had very limited
court time with O’Neal—and no court time at all with Ilgauskas, obviously—and the
next time Jamison and O’Neal are on the court together will be during the
playoffs, hardly the optimum situation for developing chemistry. Chemistry in
this instance has nothing to do with how the players get along off of the court
but rather how they function together offensively and defensively in crucial
moments: when/where to cut offensively, when/where to rotate defensively. It is
one thing to discuss such matters or even to walk through certain scenarios in
a non-contact practice but it is quite different to perform at optimum
efficiency against a good team with a playoff game on the line. The Cavs lost a
few games early in the season before fully integrating their offseason
acquisitions into Coach Mike Brown’s offensive and defensive systems and they
lost two games in a row after Jamison’s arrival; fans are quick to senselessly
blame Coach Brown for supposedly not making the right adjustments but the
reality is that it is not easy for any team to incorporate new players into the
rotation on the fly, particularly when the new players are expected to log
heavy minutes. It is a great tribute to Coach Brown that the Cavs still have
the best record in the NBA despite dealing with injuries to various key players,
Delonte West’s off court problems, the departure of Ilgauskas and the arrival
of Jamison but Coach Brown will face the greatest challenge of his head
coaching career when O’Neal returns in the middle of the playoffs; not only
will the starting lineup change but it is likely that someone who played
significant minutes during O’Neal’s absence could end up out of the rotation
completely, a switch that will not only affect that player but also the other
players who got used to playing with him.
The biggest X
factor of all—literally and figuratively—is O’Neal. Let’s assume the best case
scenario, namely that O’Neal’s thumb surgery and the ensuing rehabilitation
process go off without a hitch—there is still the not insignificant issue of a
soon to be 38 year old player who has not always been known for being in tip
top shape maintaining the necessary fitness level to play big time playoff
minutes versus (in all likelihood) Dwight Howard and/or Kendrick Perkins/Kevin
Garnett/Rasheed Wallace. When O’Neal was a Laker he once infamously declared
that he had suffered an injury on company time so he would heal on company
time; it seems unlikely that at this late stage of his career he will take such
a petulant and immature attitude but even assuming that O’Neal has the proper
mentality it will not be easy for him to stay in game shape without playing in
an NBA game for six to eight weeks.
Also, though
it seems like a foregone conclusion that Ilgauskas will return to Cleveland he, like
O’Neal, will be battling some conditioning issues initially because he will not
have played in an NBA game for a month. This is the time of year when NBA
coaches of contending teams like to have their seven or eight man rotations
set, with all of those players hopefully being healthy—or as healthy as they
can be after an 82 game regular season grind—and fully used to their roles in
terms of minutes, shot attempts, defensive rotations and so forth. The Cavs
will presumably spend the next three weeks playing “small ball,” then they will
likely close out the season and begin the playoffs with Ilgauskas starting at
center and at some point O’Neal will return, moving Ilgauskas back to the bench
and knocking one big man out of the rotation completely; that is a lot of
change for a championship contender to deal with as the regular season closes
and the postseason begins.
Labels: Antawn Jamison, Cleveland Cavaliers, LeBron James, Shaquille O'Neal, Zydrunas Ilgauskas
posted by David Friedman @ 4:27 PM
2 Comments:
http://stores.sunbearpress.com/-strse-12/Buffalo%2C-Home-of-the/Detail.bok
a bit pricey but looks like a wonderful book.
maybe the cavs should of got amare
Madnice:
I have not heard anything about that book but I agree with you that it is very expensive.
I am not convinced that Amare Stoudemire would have been a great fit for the Cavs. He and O'Neal hardly tore up the league together in Phoenix. Amare is not a defensive-minded player and he definitely gives off the vibe that his personal statistics are more important to him than winning--perhaps that is not the case or perhaps he would have changed his attitude had he been dealt to Cleveland but I think that Jamison is a better fit for the Cavs in terms of skill set (Jamison is a so-called "stretch four" who can shoot the perimeter j and create his own shot but he can also bang inside/rebound) and attitude. Also, keep in mind that the Suns wanted to receive something tangible in return for Amare, while the Cavs essentially got Jamison for free (assuming that the Cavs are able to re-sign Z). When you consider all of the above factors, it is clear that the Cavs made the best available choice.
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