CAVS.SPACE

The Cavaliers won an exciting game last night versus the Miami Heat, 92-91. The team struggled early as players seemed uncertain of their roles against the Heat. In particular, while Jermaine O'Neal and Dwyane Wade scored big early, Rafer Alston and Michael Beasley appeared to be giving the Cavs matchup problems. Rather than giving up early, LeBron James realized that he needed to take over the game for Cleveland. However, while taking primary control over the ball-handling duties, he managed to keep everyone involved. This meant that James did not get too caught up in the showdown moment, as he did in Game 7 versus Paul Pierce and the Celtics in 2008. This also brought back memories of the Cavs team that advanced to the Finals in 2007, as Daniel Gibson shined once he had less pressure on him to run the offense. A key to the Cavaliers winning this game occurred in the 4th quarter. Coach Mike Brown had the team run the offense through Shaquille O'Neal while James was resting on

I have decided to merge my blog called "The NBA Memo"--which had been serving as a supplemental blog--with this blog, which has been solely devoted to the Cleveland Cavaliers. As such, all 43 posts from "The NBA Memo" have been imported over. For future reference, posts will be labeled as "Cavs" articles or "NBA" articles.

The Los Angeles Lakers and the San Antonio Spurs were the 2 most successful NBA franchises from 1999-2000 through 2008-2009. The Spurs had more regular season success than any team, having a league best record of 576-244 (only team with .700+ regular season winning percentage) and making the playoffs all 10 years. While the Spurs won 3 Championships in 3 Finals appearances, the Lakers won 4 Championships in 6 Finals appearances. San Antonio made their run with Gregg Popovich at the helm. To their credit, they kept the same general core group in place throughout, with the centerpiece being future hall of fame forward/center Tim Duncan. This included Duncan taking the torch from now hall of fame center David Robinson. Among the team's key acquisitions were international draft picks Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker. The result was a team that ranked no lower than #4 in the Western Conference playoff seedings since the Spurs' first Championship at the end of last decade. Also to Popov

Happy New Year everybody! Well, the '00s are now over, so I found it appropriate to select an "All-Decade Team" for the Cleveland Cavaliers. This task turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be. I kicked around the idea of having several groupings and another list or two of players that succeeded in a very short time as Cavaliers. Well, I decided to scrap that idea, as the list of players got to be too long. Instead, I decided to put together a roster of 15 players (separated into 1st, 2nd, and 3rd teams) and appoint a head coach and an honorary assistant coach. To be eligible for the team, the players had to have been with the Cavaliers for at least a full season during the '00s. Rosters and statistics were acknowledged from 1999-2000 to the 2009 portion of the 2009-2010 season. (Special thanks to basketball-reference.com , cavshistory.com , and nba.com for player information.) Players were allowed to be listed out-of-position if they would possibly