Cavs Need Third Time to be the Charm

Not every team is bad in a singular way. Sometimes the house simply and unceremoniously burns down. It's uniquely painful for you, maybe, if you're a fan of the stuff that's being melted and charred, but fires happen every day; there is not much to say about them.

The Sixers, for instance, were unimaginatively terrible last year, like Nicholas Sparks had written their season into existence. You could watch a Michael Carter-Williams YouTube compilation and be near-completely caught up on everything interesting that happened with Philly in 2013-14.

The Cavs were a special kind of bad. The most ordinarily bad thing that happened is Anthony Bennett tanked in his rookie year, and I mean, sure, you would prefer the No. 1 overall pick not show up for training camp looking like the personification of 3 AM drunk-hunger, but lots of NBA newbies play poorly. Cleveland's most pressing issues are institutional. Dan Gilbert is excellent at accumulating wealth via predatory loans, but is, it turns out, sub-par at knowing about basketball things, which is a problem, because he's what a less-than-polite person would call a meddling jackass.

Surely, not everything that transpired last season was Gilbert's fault but, but: Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters couldn't get along, neither on the court nor off it. Normally mild-mannered journalist Brian Windhorst lit into Irving for his tendency to slack off for games at a time. Andrew Bynum got kicked off the team for jacking up half-court jumpers and taunting assistant coaches in practice. Model professional Luol Deng arrived in a trade and instantly announced the Cavs were "a mess." GM Chris Grant was fired in February and has been anonymously trashing the franchise ever since. Mike Brown, whom Gilbert signed to a five-year, $20 million contract shortly after firing Byron Scott, visibly lost his players' respect some 20 games into the season and employed an offensive scheme best described as not an offensive scheme.

When the Cavs improbably landed the No. 1 pick last month, it was worth celebrating because, despite all the bullshit in that previous paragraph, the team isn't all that far away from watchability and mild success. Irving is a star when he's motivated. The roster isn't lousy, but it's more a collection of talent than it is a coherent unit, something new GM David Griffin thankfully grasps and seems to be trying to fix. The David Blatt hire has been widely praised. I understand: every franchise wins the offseason, but this time last year, experts were grumbling about the historically paltry draft and the Cavs were about a week away from signing Earl Clark with the intention to start him at small forward. You give thanks for all the sunshine you get when it's winter in the taiga.

Joel Embiid's foot is broken, which is a bummer because he was a perfect fit for Cleveland, but they could still do a lot of satisfying, if not obviously correct stuff with the selection. They could take Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker. They could trade back a few spots and nab Embiid, if they believe he's more Hakeem than Oden. They won't pick Dante Exum, but I dunno, maybe they should.

Don't come to me for hard-hitting draft analysis. I'm watching the same DraftExpress videos everyone else is. (It's a testament to the wack-assity of that John Quintero track that I've heard it tens of times and have discovered nothing redeeming about it.)

The Cavs got one of those manna-from-heaven arcade game extra lives, and they're trying to use it to debungle all the bungles they've made over the past few years. Whether they can do this or not comes down to civic snakebittenness, and, okay, I guess the front office's talent evaluation skills and all that. If you've kept even half an eye on this organization over the years—or are just passingly familiar with Northeast Ohio as a region—you could be forgiven for expecting some sort of cosmic Beckettian trap door to open up on Thursday night.

They can't fuck this up. They'll fuck this up. But that's impossible, right? I'm worried, too.