Every timeLeBron James changes team, as has happened a number of times, it always feels like a swap proportional to the legendary Louisiana Purchase.
Being a superstar Basketball player, the impact of his departure is seismic and felt in more ways than one. The team he moves to feels it by being a significantly better ball club. And while it doesn’t always happen summarily, his steely resolve and unrelenting brilliance over the course of the season, eventually elevates his team to elite status.
But for his old team, it is often a different story. The city he kicks to the curb and the entire metropolitan area, are left moaning and groaning in communal melancholy. Some would resort to burning his jersey in public, pillorying and calling him names as well as engaging in other destructive indulgencies to convey displeasure and anger. But above all of that, his departure leaves his old ball club in utter shambles. LeBron’s decision to depart a team, any team, leaves behind a messy wreckage that decimates that ball club. And before you know it, losses will begin to mount. And with losses inevitably emerges frowning faces, fault lines and finger pointing. And nine times out of ten, those long fingers are pointing at the poor little coach.
That hackneyed and unfair approach to dealing with such woes is precisely what played out in Cleveland recently after the largely unexpected firing of Coach Tyrone Lue, who presided over a comatose Cavaliers that went winless in six games to kick off the season.
True, the Cavaliers are awful out of the gate this season, as their newly crowned franchise player Kevin Love, though injured, has thus far demonstrated lack of ability to carry the weight of a floundering team struggling to adjust to the post LeBron era. Is any of this Lue’s fault, though?
I certainly don’t think so.
C’mon, what exactly do you expect to see out of a severely handicapped ball club still reeling from the cavernous void left after LeBron’s departure, which at the time felt more like a monstrous earthquake had struck the entire eastern Ohio. After several years of LeBron totally anchoring the team’s offense and offering on court leadership, it seems profoundly irrational, even unhinged, to expect Love to take over that role with the same height of effectiveness so soon in the young season. Please don’t tell me it was what Owner Gilbert was quixotically salivating to see after he gleefully showered plenty of love to Love by signing him to a whopping $120 million deal extension. If so, mark him down as delusional.
Yeah, that’s a lot of wampum deservedly handed to the former Minnesota Timberwolves franchise player, but even Gilbert must admit that Love is no LeBron, despite his brilliance on the court, which so far has him racking up average of 19.5 points and 13 rebounds a game. He needs more time to adjust to his new leadership role to even come close carrying the team’s scoring load as LeBron did. Achieving his best in that regard still doesn’t make him LeBron. Far from it. For one thing, LeBron does way more than score. It was so in Cleveland, even more so there. There’s his defensive abilities and the all round basketball wisdom he brings to the theater, but perhaps more than all of that is the fact that his mere presence on the court squeezes competitive juice out of his team mates, and that’s the kind of intangible value hardly possible with Love, who, no doubt, is a great player.
Cavaliers depressing start, as is always the case with most teams that find themselves in a freefall, often leaves team brass scratching their head for answers. Often, the answer means that somebody got to go. Gilbert being the team owner, needless to say, is going nowhere, even though his decisions involving plans to rebuild the team after Lebron left may have been poor ones that could be reasons for the team’s kick off woes. Love, with his plum new contract, appears to be safe, as well.
So with that kind of reality, which offers few options to embrace, it is easy to see how poor Lue became the convenient fall guy, despite piling up a stellar record of 128-83 in his three years as coach in Cleveland, including coaching the team to a championship crown in 2016 as well as taking the once moribund Cavaliers to three consecutive trips to NBA finals.
No, it’s not fair, if you are asking. But then again, life is often not fair, and for Lue, having been around the league for quite some time now, both as player and coach, he probably saw it coming anyway. He will be alright.
