The Cavs could still… nah

By Sam Rubenstein

I’m sitting in my hotel room at 11 A.M., the day after another night of “networking.” Cleveland seems to be a nice town full of nice people, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we had to stay here through the weekend. That being said… San Antonio put your foot on their throat and snap their neck off.

The team down 0-3 in a playoff series knows that they have to make it look like they are trying, and sometimes that translates to actually being competitive and winning. Two such examples are when the Sonics beat the 70 win Bulls (and then did it a second time) in The Finals, and the Suns from two seasons ago winning the down 0-3 game against these Spurs before the inevitable series loss. Even though Cleveland has been truly an awful conference champion, they still have that proverbial puncher’s chance.

LeBron is not stupid. He saw what happened last game, and he has proven time and time again that he learns from mistakes and gets better. Now he knows that just because a t-shirt salesman named Boobie is wide open for three, it doesn’t mean that shot is going in. LeBron could play this game with the mentality that he has to take over, get to the basket every time, get the Spurs in foul trouble, and go from there. He’s got nothing to lose by trying something new. If he does that, the refs could help him out, the sweep would be avoided… oh that would be bad.

Yesterday with no game to attend, we went to practice, a few media functions, a movie, and finally a pool hall where certain people that have the competitive drive it takes to rise to the top of ESPN, proved that they can not turn off that competitive fire with a pool cue in hand. It got ugly for me and my teammates. One of the best parts of that pool hall, named “House of Cues” which was chuckleworthy in itself, was that every song they played seemed to come right from 1992-93. It was literally Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Offspring, Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls… and so on. We might have hit a time warp pocket in the plane and been transported back in time.

The night ended with Lang and myself doing the gentlemanly thing by waiting for a cab with a female friend in the media. Not only are there no cabs in all of Cleveland at 3 A.M., but there are no automobiles. I went to the front desk to try and find out what the deal was, and there were no hotel employees around to help and I had to use a rotary phone that may have once belonged to Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, we may have actually transported back in time to the days of horse-drawn carts.

Alright, we’ve got a big adventure to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame coming up today. More coverage of The Finals coming up later on. There’s really nothing more to say, but we’ll say it anyways.