When the Cleveland Cavaliers (unwillingly) said goodbye to LeBron James, they also said goodbye
to the spotlight. Everyone knew they weren’t going to be nearly as good without their superstar, and probably were only going to be worth watching if you wanted to see how important James was to the franchise.
Now they have two top-4 draft picks in Kyrie Irving and Tristan Thompson. They haven’t made it back to where they were with LeBron yet, they’re not even close, but they have some solid building blocks to work with and it seems like they’re almost a little bit happier with a “team” than with a superstar and four guys surrounding him. One of the members of the Cavs front office uses the Spurs as an example.
“[The Cavs] plan to fill the roster with more within the next year or two, and in the words of one front-office official, ‘build things the right way.’ That way, the official noted, you have ‘a culture in place like in San Antonio or Oklahoma City,’ where the team doesn’t need a superstar considered worthy of hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’ to be successful.”
I’m glad some of the Cavs organization seems to be moving on from the “LeBron era,” because others sure haven’t. I feel weird even bringing this up because it’s so crazy to think this is going to happen, but there have been some “reports” that LeBron isn’t happy in Miami and will go back to Cleveland. Some people are still clearly in denial about LeBron leaving and want to go back to the “glory days.”
The city of Clevelandand the Cavaliers organization will be much better off if they move past LeBron and focus on this new “San Antonio” line of thinking: Forget the superstar, focus on the team.
