Cleveland Sports Forum

Chris Grant out as GM
By Carter Rodriguez
Updated: February 6, 2014


Well, I certainly think that qualifies as a #WojBomb. Adrian Wojnaroski of Yahoo! Sports reported that Chris Grant, Cavaliers GM, has been fired.

It’s a bit surprising; almost everything I’ve heard about the Cavaliers organization suggests they’re not huge on mid-season firings. That said, this one makes a fair amount of sense.

Chris Grant was a dead man walking after this nightmare season, and it’s pretty apparent that Dan Gilbert wasn’t interested in letting him make any trades to save his job.

Two years ago, if you told me that Chris Grant would be fired midseason, I would have been shocked. He made a series of very good trades, including fleecing the Clippers out of the pick that became Kyrie Irving, dumping an already-leaving Ramon Sessions for a first, and getting protected firsts out of both Memphis and Sacramento.

However, the draft was not kind to Mr. Grant. Kyrie was obviously a hit, but Dion Waiters is having attitude and production issues, Tristan Thompson still can’t finish at the rim, and Anthony Bennett is thus far the worst #1 overall pick of all time.

He also swung and missed in his first real foray into Free Agency this offseason. We all know how Andrew Bynum worked out, Jarrett Jack has been inefficient and a ball-stopper, and I’d comment on Earl Clark, but I think he just stepped out of bounds on a crucial play for the 500th time.

Also, many have made the argument as of late, the great trades Grant was so lauded for all involved Dan Gilbert being willing to absorb gobs of money from teams that were looking to cut payroll. Basically, it hasn’t been good. Grant needed this team to get better, not regress, and the kids that Grant drafted haven’t turned into stars outside of Irving.

All that said, I sort of feel for Grant; he happened to be presiding over a tanking team during some of the worst drafts in recent memory. Tristan Thompson isn’t great, but were the Cavs really supposed to reach for Kawhi Leonard? He wasn’t that high on ANYBODY’S draft boards, and he certainly wouldn’t have been the player that the Spurs helped mold him into on the Cavs.

Dion Waiters also has been disappointing, but the Harrison Barnes army might not have noticed that he’s having a really, really tough season in Golden State. The only real studs in that draft were Anthony Davis, Dame Lillard, and Andre Drummond. Nobody saw this version of Drummond coming, and if you say you did, you’re a liar. Lillard plays the same position as Kyrie, and Davis was already off the board.

Anthony Bennett’s obviously been a disaster, but who were the Cavs supposed to take? Michael Carter-Williams? Now, I was a big Noel supporter at the time, but we still don’t know about that pick. Regardless, the jury’s still out on this draft class.

He didn’t have the best of luck with players available during his drafts, but, unfortunately, with the team falling apart, heads had to roll, and Grant didn’t have enough W’s on the win/loss column.

I don’t know if the bigwigs in Cleveland are ready to blow it up, but this certainly seems to be a step away from “Playoffs or bust.”

VP of Basketball Operations David Griffin is the presumptive favorite to replace Grant for now, per Bob Finnan of the News-Herald. Once we have more information about the Cavs moving forward, we’ll be sure to share.

Hopefully this is a step in the right direction; you can’t progress from a failed project unless you acknowledge that failure. This seems to be the first step. It’s not good news, but hopefully it means less of what we’ve been dealing with in the future.

Carter can be reached on Twitter @Carter_Shade.

M.S. Boyer/J. Valade @PDcavsinsider


Gilbert on Brown's job: We’re going to see Mike Brown succeed this year. I think he will be able to do good things in the next 30 games.

4:19 PM - 6 Feb 2014

Hopefully that is just Gilbert trying to get to the end of the season.

Gilbert says that the Cavs will be active at the trade deadline (Feb20) for the present and future.

Wow ! Might be the worst PC I have ever heard from Gilbert. Sounds like a damn politician ! Has to be that he does not want to pay Brown. Brown has 5 year contract at 4 million a year.

Gilbert says he has the players and the coaching staff.

Then why fire the GM that put this group together ?

@#$%^ !

I would think that the new GM would want to hire his own coach.

Cleveland Cavaliers firing GM Chris Grant and keeping coach Mike Brown doesn't make much sense - Terry Pluto


CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Something is missing.

That's what I kept thinking while listening to Dan Gilbert's press conference to announce the firing of General Manager Chris Grant. Gilbert talked about how "no one is happy" about the season. He spoke several times about the need for "cultural and environment change."

The Cavs are on a six-game losing streak. They are 16-33, only slightly better than their 15-34 record at this time a year ago, when they were playing for more lottery balls -- not a spot in the postseason. Usually when that happens, you fire the coach. Or the coach and the general manager.

I can't ever recall a general manager being fired during a season -- and the coach retained. But that seems to be the case, as Gilbert indicated that he's keeping Mike Brown -- at least for now.

"This coaching staff and this team can succeed," said Gilbert. "There's no reason why they can't … I believe these players and this coaching staff can figure it out with a positive outcome."

He also said the team "had a lot of talent." If that's the case, he fired the guy who put together the talent (Grant) but is keeping the guy who can't seem to convince them to play even close to their potential?

Why would he say that? In fact, I asked a question along those lines, but Gilbert either didn't understand my point -- or ignored it. He talked about Grant being with the Cavs for 8 1/2 years, nearly four as general manager. But Brown has been here for only about a half-season.

"We're going to see Mike Brown succeed this year," he said. "I think he will be able to do good things in the next 30 games or so. I think this team is going to be able to do good things."

Why would anyone believe that?

I asked him how he thought Brown has performed as coach. Gilbert evaded the question by saying that "Mike's not happy … no one is happy with how the performance has gone."

In my mind, if you are going to fire Grant, you may as well fire Brown. That's because the team's collapse may be even more of a reflection on Brown than Grant.

The Cavs returned from a West Coast trip with a 3-2 record. Grant had just traded for Luol Deng, and the team seemed to be moving in the right direction with the veteran small forward in the lineup.

Since then, they are 1-8. And in that span, they are allowing 105 points per game -- so much for the players responding to Brown's demands for defense. Over and over, Brown talks about the lack of effort. Instead of coming together and embracing what the coach is preaching, they seem to be rebelling more than ever.

This is not to excuse some of Grant's poor decisions when it comes to drafting, etc. But it seems hard to separate Brown from Grant when handing out blame for this collapse. And I truly believe the team should have given Byron Scott one more season with this upgraded roster -- and I believe they would be better shape right now.

Yes, it was Grant who pushed Gilbert to hire Brown.

Remember, it was Gilbert who fired Brown after the 2010 playoffs. So Gilbert had to admit he made a mistake when he rehired Brown. The owner even praised Grant for turning the Andrew Bynum signing into a deal for Luol Deng, the small forward that the Cavs have needed ever since LeBron James left in the summer of 2010.

With the trade deadline looming in two weeks, assistant general manager David Griffin has been promoted to interim general manager. Obviously, Gilbert didn't want Grant making any more trades -- although trades have been the strongest part of Grant's tenure.

It seems pointless for the Cavs to retain Brown, unless the plan is for Griffin to become the GM next season -- and Griffin wants to keep Brown as coach.

The only thing that make sense is that perhaps another move is coming. Maybe Gilbert is talking to a big-name coach such as Lionel Hollins, George Karl or Stan Van Gundy. So maybe we only know part of the story.

Because on the surface, this move of firing Grant and keeping Brown doesn't make much sense.

George Karl would be great.

Starting to think Gilbert is a big problem. cannot admit that Brown was a bad, very bad hire.

George Karl.....sigh.

Lionel Hollins - even better!

Grant Runs Out of Luck (and Time) in Cleveland

NBA
February 6, 2014
by Zach Lowe

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Chris Grant did some good things as general manager of the Cavaliers, a job he got in 2010 after a half-decade of working there under Danny Ferry during those shiny LeBron James days. We won’t hear about those things today, because the Cavs are a dysfunctional stink bomb so smelly that the team elected to fire Grant. The move comes less than 24 hours after the Cavs lost at home to a Lakers team that nearly ran out of players.

The Cavs have lost five straight by double digits, and though this season has seen blips of competence, there have just been too many demoralizing blowout losses in which they’ve looked stagnant and uninterested. I caught them in Philadelphia in early November, just 10 days into the season, and players and coaches were already grumbling about the team’s issues sharing the ball.

So Grant is gone. The bottom line is this: You can’t have four consecutive top-four picks, use two on big men, and come away with just one player, Kyrie Irving, who is a lock to be an above-average NBA rotation guy. You can’t spend three first-round picks on big men, including two of those top-four picks, and end up with precisely zero bigs who look like they could be starters on championship-level NBA teams.

Grant did well in the trades he executed, especially in gathering first-round picks and positioning Cleveland to rebuild after LeBron’s devastating and very public departure. He and his staff just couldn’t do enough with those picks, both in the draft and via trade. The Cavs now have to shift into the franchise’s next phase with just two weeks to go before the trade deadline. David Griffin, Grant’s well-regarded no. 2 guy, will take over the position on an interim basis, but most league observers expect the Cavs to look outside the organization for a fresh leadership voice before next season.

In addition to the front office, the franchise should ask itself whether Mike Brown is the right coach for this next phase of Cleveland hoops. The Cavs have been terrible on both ends of the ball, and they’ve barely improved at all on defense, supposedly Brown’s specialty. The team’s offense has gotten worse under Brown, with predictable sets, poor ball movement, zero reliable post play, and horrific shot selection. You could make a funny highlight reel of Jarrett Jack standing in the corner, holding out his hands to receive a pass that will never come — and continuing to hold the gesture in an exaggerated fashion even after Irving or Dion Waiters has launched a shot. It was Jack’s subtle mutiny, and though he is far from blameless in Cleveland’s awful season, it has been a regular symbol of this team’s dysfunction.

They should have already been wondering about Brown, but he is in just the first year of a mammoth four-year, $20 million contract he signed in the offseason. Grant was working on an expiring deal, making him the easiest and cheapest to fire, and some of his staff might not make it to next season, either.

None of the three alleged “busts” of Grant’s tenure are even 23 yet, so it seems harsh to judge them. And too many people do so without bothering to research what alternatives might have been realistically available to Cleveland at the time. Anthony Bennett has been a disaster and the most blatantly unprepared top pick in at least a decade, but you can’t ignore that he’s coming off shoulder surgery. As a result, he arrived to camp out of shape, and the Cavs have been trying to deal with at least two other medical issues of his: asthma and sleep apnea. Rival executives still see a longtime rotation guy in Bennett, though his NBA start has been discouraging.

Tristan Thompson is a decent player, but his career trend line has plateaued early. He remains an unreliable midrange shooter despite the high-profile hand switch, and though Anderson Varejao has improbably turned himself into a midrange ace, the Cavs have suffered from poor spacing in part because neither starting big man is a feared perimeter threat. Thompson has worked to craft a quirky post-up game of face-up floaters and herky-jerky off-the-bounce stuff, but it’s not a weapon that scares anyone or produces efficient points. He still looks hesitant with the ball, often pausing to bring it down or pump fake himself into an ugly rejection.

Thompson is a mobile defender capable of executing Brown’s aggressive blitzing scheme, but he’s still learning on that end, and he’s never going to be a rim protector. Grant chose him over Jonas Valanciunas, a pick who seemed shaky and impatient the moment it happened. Valanciunas hasn’t lit the world on fire, but his development is going the right way, and his size makes him a potential defensive centerpiece — something Thompson, a great guy by all accounts, will never be.

The criticism of the Thompson pick really ends there. The next set of guys were either busts or point guards the Cavs didn’t need after drafting Irving, and no one was clamoring for the Cavs to select Klay Thompson (no. 11) or Kawhi Leonard (no. 15) in Thompson’s slot. The Cavs probably should have picked Valanciunas, but the Thompson pick was not an indefensible reach.

Waiters hasn’t worked out, either, and the Cavs knew he was a reach at no. 4. He didn’t start at Syracuse, and there were very loud whispers about his negative attitude and off-court behavior well before the draft. But again, of the next half-dozen or so picks, only two, Damian Lillard and Andre Drummond, are playing at a day-to-day level above where Waiters is now. Lillard, of course, plays the same position as Irving. You might prefer Terrence Ross or Harrison Barnes, but there is very little separating any of these guys for now. Drummond is the one that got away, that one-missing-piece big man, but he got away from lots of teams.

Waiters is clearly skilled, and some team will take a shot at him if the Cavs go into full rebuild mode over the next two weeks. He can get to the rim with an off-the-dribble game featuring both power and tricky changes of pace, and he is a decent jump-shooter hitting an above-average mark from deep this season. But he just has some of the worst judgment in the NBA. He takes horrible shots, breaking plays early in the shot clock to launch off-the-bounce 20-footers. He might be the worst perimeter transition defender in the league, standing like a statue to admire his misses as entire teams leak out behind him, though most young players struggle on defense.

Had Grant nailed just one of these three picks, he’d probably have his job now. The Cavs might not be all that much better, but they’d be happier, with a clearer road map to improvement.

And again: Grant did well on the trade market. He fleeced the Kings for a first-round pick in the J.J. Hickson–Omri Casspi deal, and he used that pick to land Luol Deng. He coaxed an unprotected first-round pick from the Clippers in exchange for taking on Baron Davis’s contract, and that pick ended up being the one that got them Irving. (Fun fact: I was in the lottery drawing room the next season, and the Cavs were one number away from winning the lottery for the second straight year and getting Anthony Davis.)

He snagged a first-round pick for Ramon Sessions, though he paid a heavy price to do so in absorbing Luke Walton’s contract. He snagged an attractive first-rounder from Memphis last season — the only first-rounder to change hands at the trade deadline — by allowing the Grizz to use Cleveland as a salary dumping ground. He beefed up Cleveland’s analytics department, turning it into one of the largest in the league.

All those draft picks just never became anything that good. A segment of the front office pushed Grant hard to make a run at James Harden before last season, using a combination of picks and any Cavalier other than Irving. Grant resisted, and he has generally been known around the league as a difficult sort to deal with. Executives on other teams lament that Grant overvalues his own players to the point of paralysis, and that could have prevented the Cavs from throwing their hat in the Harden ring. Who knows how many Varejao-centric deals the Cavs didn’t even consider due to their (justified) love of Varejao, even as his age and skill set no longer fit as snugly within their rebuilding timetable?

Grant tried to accelerate that timetable by signing Andrew Bynum and splurging on Jarrett Jack, but Dan Gilbert, the team’s owner, played a role in that acceleration. Ownership made no secret of its desire to make the playoffs this season, and league sources say Gilbert was the driving force behind the Bynum signing. The Jack signing was an overpay, especially since the Cavs already had two ball-dominant guards on the roster, though at least the fourth year is almost fully unguaranteed. But Jack is a minus defender who needs the ball, and he just hasn’t fit on this team.

The Deng trade was understandable given the pressure on Grant to win now, and the giant pile of bricks previously manning the small forward position. But Cleveland gave up a lot to get him, especially since it was offering Chicago massive financial relief by sending the Bulls Bynum’s nonguaranteed deal. Deng hasn’t yet moved the needle for this team, in any way, and has struggled at times to pick up Brown’s defensive scheme — which is very, very different from Tom Thibodeau’s in Chicago.

Any GM fortunate enough to have a job for several seasons will end up with a spotty record, but the returns so far on Grant’s draft picks and free-agency signings just haven’t been good enough. (Props for spotting Alonzo Gee, though.) The misses outweigh the hits.

So, what should Cleveland do now? There will be noise about trading Irving, but I wouldn’t go there. Irving still has star potential, and all the chatter about him wanting out of Cleveland means nothing unless he’s willing to sign a short extension (as LeBron did) or even take the one-year qualifying offer in restricted free agency (something no star player has ever done). The Cavs control the situation, and though Irving has belched out a so-so season, they should be in no rush to deal him. Ditto for Waiters, Thompson, and Bennett. The Cavs are still slated to have very nice cap flexibility going forward, depending on what they do with Deng in the offseason, so they have no urgent need to sell low on any of their young guys. If they can get a first-round pick with only some protection on it, then, sure, think about dealing Waiters and his attitude issues. But otherwise, try like hell to dump Jack, test the market for Varejao and Deng, and keep the roster young and flexible.

Rebuilding in the NBA is hard. You need luck, along with hard work and skill. The Cavs just need to keep at it.

I think the Lowe article is quite well done- balanced and quite well researched. He has done his home work on Grant's tenure which was neither all good or all bad. The bottom line is the last line. This team was not ready to win this season despite what we all thought and Gilbert's ridiculous comment at last year's draft lottery. Despite giving up some assets for Deng they still are in a possession of a lot of them. I heard some ridiculous comments on the national radio waves today prior to the Grant firing stating that the Knicks situation is nirvanna compared to the CAVS-that is totally false. The Cavs are going to have a top 6 lotto pick this summer with a superstar who has been somewhat humbled in Kyrie some other young talents in Bennett thompson and Waiters and loads of cap space. I dont think we now have to be so worried that Kyrie is going to bolt. He isnt worth a max deal anyway. I applaud Gilbert for starting rebuild 2.0 today but have no clue what he was talking about in his pressor.

OK, this is probably going to surprise a lot of people.....

I agree with Ken M.

Home / Headlines / Cavaliers Considering Kenny Smith for GM
Cavaliers Considering Kenny Smith for GM

By Basketball Insiders |
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Updated: February 6, 2014

I’m hearing that Kenny Smith may be a candidate for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ general manager job. David Griffin is the interim GM.

Keep in mind, Kenny Smith had discussions with the Kings about their vacant GM job over the summer. I’m hearing Cavaliers are interested.

Read more at http://www.basketballinsiders.com/caval ... z3vtG8Y.99

CAVS MIRED IN SELF-MADE MESS

February 6, 2014 · 3:27PM




HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS — This is what happens when you try to outsmart the system without the right parts, when you think you’ve come up with a formula for an equation that doesn’t actually have one.

All of the lottery picks, risky free agent acquisitions, financial flexibility, spread sheets and advanced statistical and analytical data on the planet won’t save a NBA executive or coach from that wicked reality when the bill is due.

Cleveland Cavaliers general manager Chris Grant found out the hard way today when he was relieved of his duties and replaced, at least on an interim basis, by his former assistant and now “acting general manager” David Griffin. The Cavaliers are a mess, one of their own making, and Grant — despite keeping a low public profile by GM standards — found himself on the firing line, and rightfully so. Organizational and institutional arrogance will get you every time.

And there is no quick fix, no easy way out of this tire fire for the Cavaliers. There is only the painful and very public walking of the plank for Grant as Griffin, and whoever succeeds him, tries to salvage whatever they can from the wreckage that is the past four years and steer the franchise back onto solid ground.

You can’t blame All-Star point guard Kyrie Irving for being anxious about the direction of the franchise after yet another season goes sideways before Valentine’s Day. He’s not the one who chose Mike Brown, who had already been unceremoniously dumped in his previous stint with the franchise because he couldn’t get the franchise over the championship hump, to usher in the new era of Cavaliers’ basketball. He didn’t draft Dion Waiters or Anthony Bennett when everyone in the league would have gone elsewhere with those top picks. He didn’t sign Andrew Bynum or engineer any of the other moves that have come post-The Decision. Whether it was his call or not (most anyone with a lick of wisdom about this situation knows that Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert‘s voice was heard on each and every decision), Grant owns all of those moves.

Trading for Luol Deng was a nice move, but it didn’t happen soon enough. It came after the air of inevitability about this particular Cavaliers team, a woeful 16-33 in a depressed Eastern Conference that they were expected to make a playoff statement in, was already established.

Gilbert made his intentions for the immediate future clear in a statement released by the team:

“This has been a very difficult period for the franchise. We have severely underperformed against expectations. Just as this is completely unacceptable to our loyal and passionate fan base, season ticket holders and corporate partners, it is also just as unacceptable to our ownership group. I can assure everyone who supports and cares about the Cleveland Cavaliers that we will continue to turn over every stone and explore every possible opportunity for improvement to shift the momentum of our franchise in the right direction. There is no one in our entire organization who is satisfied with our performance, and to say that we are disappointed is an understatement. We all know the great potential of our young talent, seasoned veterans, as well as our recent all-star addition. We believe a change in leadership was necessary to establish the best possible culture and environment for our entire team to flourish.

There is no move, nor any amount of capital investment, we will not make if we believe it will improve our chances of competing and winning in this league for both the short and long term. The fans of this great city have invested too much time, money and effort for the kind of product we have recently delivered to them. This must change,” concluded Gilbert.
This is the latest example of a franchise assuming that there is a template for the type of success enjoyed by the likes of the San Antonio Spurs translating to every other market. It takes stars, superstars usually, and just the right fit to launch an outfit from the lottery to the upper echelon of the league. The players come first, then the success. That’s the way it’s always been and always will be. Assuming that some set infrastructure is supposed to come first is where the Cavaliers went wrong.

They were spoiled during the LeBron James years. They foolishly assumed their fabric had as much to do with those teams making deep forays into the playoffs year after year as James did. Maybe they realize now that there is no chicken and egg debate here. You either grow your superstar and surround him with the right pieces to reach his potential or you make mistake after mistake — the Cavs, before and after Grant joined them (he was an assistant GM first) made plenty of those while LeBron was on his way up — and eventually watch things come apart at some point down the road.

James didn’t depart his native Northeast Ohio because he hated snow or tired of the comforts of home. He went to Miami to win and because the Heat, and Pat Riley, offered a surefire path to the one thing all of the all-time greats covet most, and that’s a Larry O’Brien trophy.
I knew where this thing was headed the moment Gilbert’s now infamous post-Decision promise that the Cavs would win a title before James and the Heat was unearthed to the public.

The risky move to sign Bynum over the summer, when the Cavs were one of a handful of teams with cap space and assets to make big moves, was one that alerted the players already on the roster that Grant and his staff were grasping for anything to make a splash.

It turns out that the Bynum signing was every bit the useless play I thought it was. All it did was increase the tension in an already fragile relationship between Irving and Waiters. The Cavaliers’ locker room culture wasn’t strong enough to absorb and force a cat with Bynum’s baggage to conform, the way he’ll have to in Indiana now if he wants to stick around with a contender for the remainder of this season.
Their Central Division rivals to the north in Indianapolis are a shining example of what the Cavaliers could have and should have been able to do during the time that has passed since LeBron’s departure. They took risks in drafts, free agency and trades and in hiring Frank Vogel as their coach to manage what has become one of the most complete and balanced rosters in the league.

It certainly helps to have Larry Bird, Donnie Walsh and Kevin Pritchard at the helm while going through the rebuilding process. But that’s still no excuse for the Cavaliers taking such a cavalier attitude towards conventional wisdom over the course of the past five or six seasons.
In a results-oriented business, the Grant-led Cavaliers simply never showed enough to warrant him making it to the final year of his contract. And now that same mess he inherited will be passed along to Griffin and whoever else follows. Whether or not Irving, Deng and any of the other players acquired on Grant’s watch will be around to see this thing to the finish is anyone’s guess.

But there are some certainties involved in this process, no matter how many perceived assets the person calling the shots is working with. You can go off on your own and decide to reinvent the game if you want, you can take players that don’t fit and squeeze with all your might to try to make it work. You can look past fresh new faces in the coaching ranks in an attempt to right a past wrong or what have you, but you can not and will not circumvent the system. It just doesn’t work.

If you don’t believe it, ask Gregg Popovich how that all would have worked in San Antonio if he didn’t haveTime Duncan to build around; or Sam Presti in Oklahoma City without Kevin Durant.

The superstar players come first, then the structure around them. And it all has to fit together

Time to cut Cavs' Bennett some slack

February, 7, 2014


By Marc Stein | ESPN.com



He's still just 20 years old.

He didn't have a summer league, or even a fall, to properly prepare for his first NBA season because of a serious shoulder injury.

And he never asked to be taken No. 1 overall in a draft that, weak as it looked beforehand and is proving to be now, had none of the experts projecting him to be the top pick.

So ...

Maybe we all should be cutting Anthony Bennett just a bit more slack.

Just a bit.

Bennett's unsightly rookie season took another hit Thursday when the Cleveland Cavaliers abruptly fired general manager Chris Grant, who was responsible for drafting the UNLV freshman ahead of, say, Nerlens Noel or Victor Oladipo. And one of the reflex reactions, in the aftermath of the news, was that Bennett's Year 1 struggles sealed Grant's fate.

Wrong.

Grant lost his job midseason because Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, after guaranteeing his team would not be back on the lottery dais in 2014, felt he had to make some sort of statement/big change in the wake of Cleveland's humiliating home loss to the most depleted team that the Los Angeles Lakers have ever fielded.

So Gilbert naturally fired the executive with the expiring contract and the poor draft record as opposed to the coach who's in Year 1 of a whopping five-year deal.

Yet what happened against the Lakers was merely the low point after months and months of disarray and dysfunction. Kyrie Irving's star has lost a hard-to-believe amount of gleam given how much praise he was generating as recently as last July at a Team USA minicamp in Las Vegas. Dion Waiters' reputation for coachability, and as a teammate, is worse yet. And the general toxicity in the air around this team -- where rumblings of player discontent with Mike Brown are getting louder by the day -- makes you wonder if they have any hope of re-signing newly acquired (and shell-shocked) Luol Deng in free agency.

That's right: What was supposed to be a season exciting enough to make LeBron James think seriously about leaving Miami to come back to the Cavs has descended into such farce that sources close to the situation are already saying that there's little-to-no chance Deng will agree to stay once he hits free agency.

So let's just say that the work environment for Bennett's leap into a spotlight typically reserved for the more NBA-ready Kyries and Anthony Davises hasn't exactly been nurturing.

The kid certainly shouldn't get a completely free pass. Not after you miss your first 16 shots as a pro and still have a stat line in February that doesn't come close to Kwame Brown's rookie numbers. He has plenty of work to do that only he can tackle, as our own David Thorpe neatly explains in his Bennett take Friday, starting with shedding even more weight than he's managed to lose.

But the Cavs, until recently, haven't committed to making sure Bennett gets the no-matter-what minutes he needs -- at power forward -- to transition to the NBA game and rebuild his confidence. With Gilbert's postseason pipe dreams slipping away even in the easy East and Brown making no impact on this team defensively when that's his supposed specialty, they would be wise to realize that salvaging something from Bennett's rookie season should be one of the priorities from here.

Cleveland has amazingly landed the No. 1 overall pick twice since LeBron's departure. Focusing on getting to something resembling a good place with both Irving and Bennett, over the season's final 33 games, thus strikes me as a far more reasonable (and advisable) goal than worrying about the owner's ill-advised playoff guarantee.

By more than just a bit.

http://www.stationcaster.com/player_ski ... &f=2410563

Brian Windhorst on the Cavs.