2013-14 Cleveland Cavaliers Season Preview
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October 8, 2013Grantland’s Zach Lowe, one of the best basketball writers in the business because of his writing background and analytic bent, wrote his annual NBA power ranking tiers story today. It’s worth your time.
In order, teams that are mentioned first in the Eastern Conference: Miami, Chicago, Indiana, Brooklyn and New York. Those are the top contenders, as many expect. Three playoff spots would remain after those teams. Up next in Lowe’s tiers, he shared the “Eastern Conference Morass” of Atlanta, Washington, Detroit and Milwaukee.
Thus, Lowe mentioned nine times already. After that, his “Eastern Conference Swing Teams” tier was Toronto and Cleveland. Here is how he began his commentary on Mike Brown’s Cavaliers:
No one has any clue with these guys. If they get, say, 120 combined games between Anderson Varejao and Andrew Bynum, plus the expected development from all their young players, the Cavs could vault right into the no. 6 spot and perhaps even challenge for no. 5. If they get considerably fewer Varejao-Bynum games, they might fail to win even 30 games for the fourth straight year A.L. (After LeBron).
In that context, absolutely, the Cavs are one of the most boom-or-bust potential-laden teams in the NBA. Winning fewer than 35 games, however, would likely be a huge disappointment for owner Dan Gilbert and GM Chris Grant.
As I wrote back in The Diff in late July, the average Eastern Conference No. 8 seed in nine years of the current conference alignment has averaged just 39.7 wins. Perhaps this year, the No. 6-11 crowd is much more competitive than in the past, but usually just about 40 wins puts a team in contention in the weak East.
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7 Comments
Lowe’s assessment is pretty spot-on. Huge variance with the Cavs this year.
This headline is really misleading. His “No one has any clue” comment was directed at the team in general, not their picks.
It’s so true, and it’s what makes me simultaneously ecstatic and terrified about the upcoming season.
I think there is real potential for this to be a pretty good team, but it requires so much to go right (healthy bynum, andy, and kyrie; improved waiters; actual defense; bennett to be a ROY candidate, TT’s hand experiment working).
If those things don’t come to fruition, this is simply another bad cavs team wasting another year of Kyrie being amazing.
“If they get, say, 120 combined games between Anderson Varejao and Andrew
Bynum …” – then I’ll wonder whether they’ve added one of those suspicious upstate New York horse trainers to the staff. Between them they’d have to average 60 games this season. Andy’s averaged 25 games/season the last three years, and Bynum is always nicked up even when he’s healthy (and he sure ain’t healthy).
Health almost as much as their play defensively is probably the single most important factor to the upcoming season. Fortunately when it comes to health the Cavaliers are probably the deepest they’ve been in a long time on the roster. With so many new faces and the return of the old new head coach it’ll be interesting to see what this team can do. I expect the early part of the season to be somewhat of a struggle between all of the new faces and coaching change. That should improve as the season goes if they can remain relatively healthy.
I disagree a bit. I think this is still a .500 team even if Bynum doesn’t play the majority of games, and Bennett hardly has to be anything close to a ROY candidate for this team to be good.
Whats the avg 8 seed in the west over that span? If the balance of power has truly shifted, that might be a better benchmark than .500 …