For a franchise that lost 63 games and stopped playing in mid-April, the Cleveland Cavaliers have had a rather glorious spring, full of charmed ping-pong balls and perverse satisfaction.
The Cavaliers won the draft lottery. LeBron James lost the championship. Karma is running victory laps through Cleveland’s Warehouse District. Optimism is staging a comeback.
And come tonight, the downtown arena affectionately known as the Q will be rocking again, in a celebration of blind hope.
Cleveland will make the first pick of the NBA draft, most likely selecting Kyrie Irving, the talented Duke point guard. The Cavaliers will select again at No. 4, perhaps with a chance to take Enes Kanter or Jonas Valanciunas, two intriguing international centers.
At Quicken Loans Arena, fans will gather for a draft party that may be as therapeutic as it is celebratory.
“There’s just a feeling that forces have really changed in the right way for the Cavs,” said Mike Snyder, the sports director and morning talk-show host for WTAM 1100-AM, the team’s flagship station.
Optimism? In Cleveland?
“Absolutely,” Snyder said. “This is the time to be optimistic.”
In a sports town that is numb to heartbreak, optimism is a necessarily relative term. And in this case, it will be tempered by the reality of a dismal draft class — one that scouts have called the worst in years. There are no franchise saviors or guaranteed All-Stars on the board.
At least 10 top prospects — including several likely lottery picks — stayed out of the draft, largely because of the threat of a lockout. What results is a two-man draft, with Irving and Derrick Williams, the Arizona forward, viewed as the only players worthy of much excitement. The drop-off in talent and marquee value is precipitous.
Even Irving, a 1.93m 19-year-old with enviable athleticism and playmaking skills, is a bit of a vague commodity after a truncated college career. He played only 11 games as a freshman because of a toe injury, averaging 17.5 points and 4.3 assists. He led Duke to the round of 16 in the NCAA tournament, losing to an Arizona team led by Williams.
However, after James’s cruel departure last summer and the depressing season that followed, Cavaliers fans are overdue for a mood enhancement, and Irving is their St John’s wort. He might not return the Cavaliers to immediate glory, but he represents the first step toward a semi-respectable post-LeBron era.
Draft watchers and team executives expect Cleveland to take Irving with the first pick, leaving Williams to the Minnesota Timberwolves at No. 2.
Although Irving’s resume is incomplete — “When he was on the court, he did some electric things,” said Fran Fraschilla, the former college coach and ESPN draft analyst — Fraschilla called Irving “one of the best shooters I’ve seen” among point guards coming into the league.
“He’s got holes, but he’s a very safe pick whether you take him one or two,” he added.
That Cleveland is in a position to draft Irving is, in itself, a sign of changing fortunes. In February, the Cavaliers traded Mo Williams, their starting point guard, to the Los Angeles Clippers for Baron Davis and a first-round pick. Despite just a 2.8 percent chance, that pick turned into the No. 1 selection in the draft lottery held on May 17, sparking a modest celebration in Cleveland.
Four weeks later, Cavaliers fans rejoiced as the Dallas Mavericks won the championship, beating James and the Miami Heat.
“It sure makes people feel better,” Snyder said.
Yet only a full-fledged Cavaliers revival can give fans any lasting relief and that day may be years away. Fortunately, they are used to waiting.
“Cleveland fans are resilient,” said Scott Sargent, a cofounder of the Cleveland sports blog Waiting for Next Year. “They’re just hopeful that — I don’t want to say, ‘Pain,’ — but that after all the turmoil that the franchise went through over the last year, that there is some end story to it that it is worthwhile.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier