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Listen, I get it. Every basketball player wants to be the star. So when you have teammates as talented as LeBron James and Kyrie Irving on your team, like the players on the Cleveland Cavaliers did, your chances of being the main man are pretty limited.
That being said, the Cavs have made it to the NBA Finals, winning once, each of the last four years, three with Irving on the team, including the 2016 Championship squad.
So to say you are excited to not be playing with James and Irving seems a little silly to the average NBA fan…like me.
That isn’t stopping current Cavaliers players like Kyle Korver, Larry Nance Jr., Tristan Thompson, Channing Frye and others, including coach Tyronn Lue, from sounding a little excited to play without the two superstars next season. At least according to the comments that they made to Cleveland.com this week.
“Not that I hated it before,” Korver said. “I like basketball. But I definitely like to move. That’s a big part of my game and it always has been. Running around and trying to create offense with energy.”
Of note, the Cavs finished in the top five in offensive efficiency each of the last four years.
“Kind of like a five-man attack,” said Nance. “Obviously, we are going to showcase Kev. That’s our guy and that’s who we are going to showcase early and often. But there’s not a player that we can put on the floor this year that isn’t a threat. You are going to see a whole lot of everybody.”
That will be certain because, as of right now, there is no one go-to player on the team.
“A lot of moving the ball. I think we’re trying to take a little from how Boston plays, get everyone touching the ball, not so much isolations,” said Thompson. “Just because of the dynamic of our team, I think we’ll be better if everyone’s sharing the ball, being all in attack mode.”
That would be because they don’t have a current go-to player on the team.
“I think with this personnel, to be honest, we have maybe one or two guys who are top of the mill one-on-one guys and the rest are just kind of figuring our way and we’re a thousand times better with movement. In years past this is more stuff the second unit would do and it’s worked pretty dang well for us,” said Frye.
“It’s going to be fun to watch. True basketball people are going to like the fact that we’re using the corner, we’re using the elbow, we’re using the top of the key. It’s not just a lot of one-on-one stuff, it’s a lot of good actions, it’s reads and it’s going to be fun. We’re going to have some lumps sometimes, but once you get over those lessons, we’re going to be pretty dang good.”
Cavs players like Korver and others may be excited now, but we’ll see how they feel about King James being in L.A. after 30 or 40 games.
“[Korver] loves all the movement and running around,” Lue said. “He’s in heaven right now.”
According to NBA.com stats, 66.3 percent of Korver’s shot attempts were considered open (the defender 2-4 feet away) or wide open (the defender 4-6 feet away) during the 2017-18 season. The year before, the number was 65.8 percent.
That’s because James and Irving were drawing all the defensive heat.
But yeah, at least this time LeBron left Cleveland, they won’t drop from 61 wins to 19. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.